Therapy Session - The Tools We Use For Affiliate Marketing

Before Convert Box, we were using a tool called Optinmonster, which isn't a bad tool. I don't mind it. I wasn't a huge fan of a lot of the designs of, like, the. The way the opt in forms looked. I thought they looked a little outdated to me. But then Convert Box came along and so we actually kind of got a review copy of it. We kind of got to play around with it before some other people. So we put it up on our website instead of OptinMonster to test how it would do it. We made it so, like, my face, it looks like my face is down in the corner and then the opt in is like a little bubble coming out of my face. So it kind of looks more like intercom. One of those like, hey, do you need help or do you got questions? It kind of looks more like one of those boxes than it does an actual opt in form. And by switching over to that style, we literally doubled our opt in rate on our website.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

Hey, my friend. Good to see you again.

Good to see you again. Even though I've been with you all damn day.

We have. And we've. Honestly, this is a little behind the scenes action for y'. All. We've been probably spending the last hour trying to set up two logitech, like, webcams. Not even, like, nice cameras, really. Webcams on two little tiny tripods between. Between Matt and I. Yeah. We've already started and failed the whole recording of this podcast for, like 10 minutes.

Yep.

Because the cameras were like, awkwardly in our field of vision and we couldn't keep our train of thought and, well.

Even how the way we're shooting it right now, we're not looking into the camera because if we were looking into the camera, it was like we were thinking about it too much. So we couldn't really, like, communicate with each other properly.

Yeah.

So do you get a video with us slightly looking off camera now? Yeah.

So we're doing. We're trying some new stuff and it's that direction of some of our partners, people helping us with our podcast and.

Shout out to Valor Media helping us grow our podcast.

Charlie Valor. Yeah. Big props.

Yeah. Well, if we're. If we're giving props to people, let's give one to our sponsor.

Oh, that would be. That would make a lot of sense. They're paying us for those props.

Yes.

Yes.

So this episode is sponsored by ahrefs. They're our favorite SEO tool. And I'm actually not gonna talk a whole lot about em right now in this sponsorship because we're gonna talk about em a little bit more in this episode.

So I'll fill the extra 20 seconds that we need to fill to get paid on this spot. Since they paid for a 30 second intro, is to outline that. Okay. We're gonna cover a lot about Ahrefs and how we use it in our business. Like about halfway through this episode, maybe towards the low or last third, um, we go to their. Their website, ahr. That's a H R E F s dot com. They have a ton of free tutorials on their blogs or on their blog, but on YouTube, there's a whole ton of, like, video tutorials. So if you're ever at all thinking of new strategies on how to grow your SEO and use a tool, you can do that. And they have a trial for seven days. $7@a hrefs.com. yes.

And if you stick around, we will definitely talk about them even more in this episode.

Yep. Yes.

Go ahead. What are you.

The notes. I mean, we created some. Really? Did I take your words out of your mouth, Matt?

A little bit.

Interesting. It's our show flow.

You really should keep your hands out of there.

Yeah.

Horrible visual. All right, so those are not going to be in the notes. Don't worry. They're not actionable for you. Me? No. We took notes on this whole thing. So just to let you know, in this episode, I don't think we even talked about it yet. We're gonna talk about all the marketing tools that we use in our affiliate marketing tools. That is in our business, basically our tool stack when it comes to software. But more importantly, how we use the software and how they connect with each other and how we use that for our affiliate marketing endeavors. We took notes on all these. We made them very actionable. So not only are you gonna get all the names of each one of these tools that we use, and we will link in the show notes too, because I know sometimes they're hard to find. Or like, some of these are affiliate links and things that we actually promote and earn a commission. Of course, clicking the link would be beneficial to us and support us, but also it gives you. It lets you nab some bonuses and we're always cool and here to support you. We have, like, little communities for each one. Not each one, but some of these things. Yep. So cool. Let's all get the notes. Where do they get them at?

So if you. You can actually go to flowchart group.com to get the notes, we're actually changing things up a little bit.

What happens when you go to that URL?

So if you go to flowchartgroup.com, you'll be able to request to join our Facebook group. When you request to join our Facebook group, We are now delivering a lot of these companions to people who request to join the Facebook group. So that is actually the new way we'd like you to go and get the notes for this episode. If you're not a member of the Facebook group, go become a member of the Facebook group and we'll send you the notes to the latest episode.

So it's a two for one, right?

Two for one.

So basically, yeah, within two weeks of this episode dropping, going live, you'll get the notes for free@flowchartgroup.com but not only that, a little flowchartgroup.com redirects you really to Facebook, our Facebook community, which we have us in there, our team, but also all the listeners, all the cool listeners and the vips, and then a lot of the guests, too. But now what's new is you do have the opportunity to also get some free notes in there. Our action guides. Not just notes. Notes are boring. Notes are just a sleeper. Yes.

These are action guides.

Action guides.

We started cutting out some of the fluff.

We kind of cut out some of the backstories. Right.

Of the guides. Yeah. Not really the episodes, but yeah, yeah, yeah.

We've talked about this a lot, but we surveyed the list and some of the feedback we got from people specifically around these action guides was, I don't really need as much of the story in the notes. I just want the actionable resources, tactics, tips, like the stuff that I can go do something with right now. So we've actually started cutting back these action guides a little bit to just get straight to the meat.

Yeah. And yeah, I think that's going to be a good. It's a good change and it's a change that we heard from all of our listeners. So possibly you or if you're new here, you benefit. Yeah. So, yeah. Flowchart group.com I've said that already far too many times. Just go there and get it. Because we're going to talk about a lot of tools. I don't know what's. We have a list in front of us.

I don't even know if Joe's looked through the list yet.

I have. I have not read every word, but I know every tool. So. Yeah, so it's like 15, 20 different tools. So I'm pretty sure it's 10 because. No, it's 10.

Joe's counting right now because he doesn't believe me.

Of course it's 10. It just looks bigger than it's. Those bullets are like. They're sub bullets. That's what it is. Yeah.

So just to come back around to what we're talking about today, we. So this is actually something that's been requested. Right. One of the things that we get asked a lot is like, what tool are you using for X, Y or Z?

Right.

We're affiliate marketers. We do a lot of affiliate marketing. So we thought, let's hone in on one episode. Here are the tools that we use as affiliate marketers. These are the tools that make it easier for us to be affiliate marketers. And so that's what we're gonna get into today. But I do wanna give a little bit of a disclaimer for anybody who's in the future right now.

Right.

Like if. If you're listening to this in 2027.

We should update this podcast episode.

Yeah. If you're listening to this in 2027, the tools we're talking about right now may not be the same tools we're still using today. Most of the tools we use today in 2027 are like virtual reality. We just put on our goggles and run our business that way.

Future you. I really wish you told me which one to invest in many of these companies, because if they're still exist, like in 2027. Yeah. Doing all right.

Quibi. Invest in Quibi.

No. No. Oh, boy. A lot of money. Lot of money lost. Okay. A little too soon, Matt. Well, not for the future.

Yeah, not for 2027.

It made a resurgence for us mere mortals in this odd world of 2020, which will probably go down in many history books.

Yes.

We're talking about this rinkity dink way to make money online. That's probably not going to even be necessary by 2027, since you're listening to.

This in your spaceship right now.

Affiliate marketing. This is a wild concept of we make a little bit of money when you go buy this thing using our link or from word of mouth. Interesting. So that's what we're going to talk about here. That's how we make the bulk of our revenue. Yeah, we figured we'd just share all the cool tools that we use.

Well, before we get into the tools. Was there any other, like, anything going on in your life, in the world, anything else that you want to get off your chest before we get into these tools? I mean, this is therapy, after all.

This is therapy. Yeah. And this isn't. This is a new setup at the therapy session. I will say it doesn't feel like therapy, talking about marketing tools, but we're going to.

We never actually have notes in front of us for therapy session either.

In full disclosure, we don't typically ever prep for therap sessions either, or record.

Videos for therapy sessions.

I'm very out of my element for this therapy session, Matt. I feel like I have a camera in my face.

Yeah, we do.

What do I want to get? I don't know, man. We've recorded a couple episodes today. I've been enjoying. You know, what I've been enjoying is working with the folks that have helped us, actually. Why we're recording video and the email stuff that we've been doing lately. So that's why we're shouting out Charlie Valor. We shouted him out, but Joe Kearns. Yep. And Mike, his partner. Do they have a company name? I don't know their company.

Yeah, it's magic spelled in an interesting way.

The look of Joe Kern's in a magic spelling. Just try multiple ways and you'll find them, I'm sure. Or ask us. So, yeah, those guys are helping us on the email automation side, which will play into a lot of these tools. I'm finding just a fun time, just myself, like, figuring out the puzzle. And Joe Kearns even said that too. He's like, it's really cool to see you guys figure out this puzzle.

Yeah.

And the reason it's a puzzle is because we're, like, literally scrapping everything that we know about email marketing, but fitting in our vision for the company, but also multiple other companies in the process, and then fitting in what our survey results have said from our listeners, and then creating a journey around all of that. I find that fun. I think it's really cool.

I think it's really cool, too. And we've had. These are probably future therapy session episodes, but we've had a couple good discussions today. Just in the gaps, too. Right. We were talking about. We were talking about gamification of business. We were talking about, like, you know, when you're. This was from a Naval Ravikant podcast when he was on Tim Ferriss, a great, great podcast episode with Tim and Naval. But at one point in the episode, they were talking about if everybody sees business as A game. If you're trying to treat business as this game, well, when do you finally win the game? Like, when have you beaten the game? Games on PlayStation and Xbox and stuff. Most of them have a way to beat the game to know when you're finished with the game.

You just beat Zelda last night.

I did just beat Zelda last night. Yes.

Nerd. I love it. I'm so jealous, man. My baby's all consuming right now. But that's case in point, right? You stuck with that game and now you reach this point. Yeah.

And so applying that to business, how do we sort of gamify our business? But also, if you are going to gamify your business, how do you know when you beat the game? How do you know? Like, okay, cool, I finally won this game. Is it a money milestone? Is it an exit of a business? Is it, you know, the purchase of something you've always wanted? Like, how do you know when you finally won the game? And now you can sort of move on to a different game.

Right.

Maybe creation of wealth and growing the money that's in your bank account is no longer the game you care to play because you've already beat that game and you can move on to another game. And I am very terrible explaining this concept, but it was a great discussion between Tim and Naval on the Tim Ferriss show.

Makes perfect sense. It's like you could play the game game ify it's. And then listen back to one of those episodes we did with the one thing. Guys think about this, because they reference the same thing that was Jeff woods was the first episode we did, and then Jay Papazon was the second. We actually recorded it today. It's top of mind, but they Both reference page 114 in the 1 Thing book. And it talks about the circles of focus, or I don't know what they call it, but basically the important things in your life, like health, business, family, you know, this spirituality. Yeah. And like, think about that. You can gamify each one of those.

Absolutely.

And yeah, I think that's. That's really cool. And Naval, like, dude, one of the most brilliant minds of. I feel like just business, but I don't know, it's just fascinating to follow. Yeah. Naval Ravikant.

And then the other discussion we've kind of had quite a bit today, which we will definitely not get into on this podcast, is the whole discussion of does it make sense to continue to live in California? But we're not going to go there on this episode.

We're going to Type CA next time, not this episode. So let's get into it. I think we. We start riffing around our tools. So these are all the cool marketing, affiliate marketing. I keep saying marketing tools because they are, but we have a spin to them when it comes to affiliate marketing.

I don't feel like any of these tools are specifically for affiliate marketing, but they're all tools that we use to be more effective with our affiliate marketing.

So going through this list, you know, if you're new here, I'm not the techie guy of the two of us.

I feel like I find more creativity when I understand how a tool works and then I could figure out the puzzle, like what we're doing with Joe Kearns right now. And I like to create things within the system. But you, my friend Matt, people will learn that you are not. I mean, you are creative, but you're way more hands on, on the tech side of things and you'll figure out the limits of a tool. And what's.

I almost see tech as a creative pursuit in the sense that I love trying to tie technical tools together in ways that people haven't tied them. To me, there is something like creative art form about the tech that we do. Like, I don't know if it was Matt mullenweg, but the WordPress guy who had the quote, like, code is art. Right. Like, a lot of coders see themselves as artists because they're creating something that didn't once exist before through their code. I almost see that with a lot of the tech and the tools and the things that we're doing in our business is pulling all these tools together and using them in a way that nobody else has quite figured out how to use these tools together yet. And to me, that in itself is kind of like a creative art form.

I think it is. I think it is like writing like what, Steven Pressfield or the war of art. Yeah. And it is interesting too, because when we present, we do a lot of talks to a lot of podcaster groups lately, like PodFest, Pod Max, and, you know, War Room. But talking about podcasting. Yeah, but like, I think the interesting thing is that we have a podcast, obviously, and. But we have a whole business that happens from this point in time. Like, as a listener, you are on part of the journey. You're not on the entire journey at all.

Yeah.

But you might be when you get off this podcast and go to your email or the facebook group@flowchart group.com or get the notes, like, literally, like all these, we have Designed all these different things online in any different modality, really, of content. Either ourselves or our team or systems have created these things on a consistent schedule where a lot of people are like, how the hell do you do all of this stuff? They're like, man, you guys are so busy. And we're like, we're not. I promise you, we are probably working much less now, but we're working way more strategically. We have the right tools in front of us, but also the strategy. I feel like. Is that glue?

Yeah. I feel like this is just good to share because this is what most people ask us about. And they're like, how do you do all that? Well, that's kind of what we'll do here. Probably not in full detail, strategy wise. Yeah, yeah, that would be impossible. Cool.

Well, should we go ahead and dive into the first tool?

Yes.

All right. So one of the big ways that we do affiliate marketing is through email marketing, right? We're collecting leads, people who listen to the podcast and go get the companion, people who pop onto our website and opt in for one of the companions. When we go on other people's podcasts, we offer one of our books as a free opt in. We do a lot of things to go and collect emails so that when somebody's on our email list, we can then put tools like the stuff that we're talking about today in front of the email list. So people on our email list, uh, they, they initially come onto the list because they enjoy the podcast, they enjoy the content. But then when we start recommending tools to them and saying, hey, this is what we use for this, this is what we use for this, that's a lot of where our sales come from, is just recommending the things that we're using in our business. Um, and the way we capture and collect and broadcast those emails is a tool called ActiveCampaign. That's what we use for the, the email marketing. And there's, you know, there's tons of tools out there. We had Tom Kohlzer from Aweber on here. Aweber is a great, great tool. We used to use Drip. Drip's a good tool if you're in e commerce. ConvertKit, we haven't really had much experience with it ourselves, but we hear great things about ConvertKit. But ActiveCampaign is the one that we really, really like for a handful of reasons which.

Well, we've even used like infusionsoft, if you want to go that far back too, because I know a lot of folks either are members of that or have heard of it. But yeah, I mean, so with ActiveCampaign, as with most autoresponders, email autoresponders, you know, you can send broadcasts such as those one off emails on like schedule or just send right away or you can automate things and you can do all crazy sorts of automations and schedules and sequences. Yeah, and that's where, that's what I was alluding to when designing stuff with Joe Kearns. Like, you know, in this whole thing on the back end after the podcast, this kind of email sequence happens. Tons of sequences are actually like waiting to happen though. Yeah, but you listening or reading emails are on this journey. And the way that we are now designing it is that it's kind of like the things you select create your journey. Yeah.

You're choosing your own venture, but you don't even realize it.

Totally. And it's amazing because it makes, well, it makes our lives easier because we don't have to send emails every day. And if you did this, it'd be same for you, but for. Yeah, it's just delivering more custom value to each person going through there. So everyone has a different journey.

Yeah. So to give sort of a more granular example, let's just say I send an email with a strategy about affiliate marketing in the email and you click on the link in that email. Well, that tells me that you have an interest in affiliate marketing. Maybe tomorrow's email is all about a podcast growth strategy and you don't click on that email. Well, that tells me maybe you're not interested in podcasting. So why would I send you another email about podcasting on day three if you didn't take any interest on day two? So, you know, this is a sort of.

You know, real quick broad view of what we're doing, but essentially we could put content in front of you, and if you click on the content, you're essentially raising your hand saying, I, you know, I like this content because it made me click. And if you don't click on the content, then you're basically raising your hand saying, that's not for me. And we're going to direct you to different emails based on the actions you took in the emails prior to it. And we're building this all out in a very automated way where we're not on a daily basis sending these broadcasts. You enter the system and based on the actions you're taking, you're seeing different emails. So nobody on our list is ever really seeing the same emails on the same days. You're seeing what's most relevant to you based on actions you've taken previously. And that's what we're building out. And Active Campaign is probably the tool between ActiveCampaign and Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft's quite a bit more expensive, but between ActiveCampaign and Infusionsoft, like, those are really the two tools where you can really dial that sort of segmentation and branching off. Really dial that stuff in.

Yeah, and it's not. I mean, it can get complicated, but really, like, there's a lot of models. So I'll just, you know, there's a models, models and frameworks to follow. We'll say. And George Bryant. So we mentioned him. He has a course. You can look him up. He's been on the show, the podcast. So throughout all of this, I was just noting some things that we'll do in some of these tools, like we'll reference other episodes for you to explore. Yeah, so, like, George Bryant would be a great episode. The Robin Kennedy episode. The two email guys from the email marketing show is their podcast, but check them out. Episode on our show. And we have a few others. Yeah, but those are. I would say start with those, because those are the two guys. And, you know, some of them that we're really getting a lot of influence from.

And we'll likely bring on Joe Kearns and Mike Alvarez, his partner. We'll likely bring on those guys in the future to literally talk about what they set up in our business and just share with you, like, this is what the sequence looks like and what it consists of. So we will be talking about that more in future episodes. The point of this one is, if you want to know the engine that drives all of it for us right now in our business, it's ActiveCampaign.

Cool. Let's move on. Second tool, convert box. So there's a reason why this is here. Now, Matt, you're so smart at outlining these things in order. Convert box is basically directly attached to activecampaign in our world. So that is the software tool that essentially will collect that email for you. There's a lot of other stuff, too, which we could talk about, but essentially that is how you add someone to your email list, and then that is now Synced over to ActiveCampaign or other autoresponders if you choose. We use Campaign, obviously, and then from there we can do all that fancy magic that you just talked about.

Yep.

So if you go to our website, you're gonna see a ton of convert box elements. There's like, literally we have like four per page almost. Yep. Doing different things. Yeah.

You'll get the one that when you land on the page, it kind of slides in that says, do you want the companion for this? There's some, you know, banners on the sidebar where if you click one of the banners, it makes it pop up where you can opt in when you go to leave the website. You know how you kind of move your mouse off the browser? It says, hey, wait a minute. Like we do that with convert box Exit intent, the exit intent pop ups. All of that kind of stuff we're building out with convert box. And when somebody puts their email in that box and hits submit, it gets dumped over into that activecampaign account. So when they plug in their email and submit it, that email is now inside of ActiveCampaign and you're on our broadcast list. And you just got added to that whole system and sequence that we're talking about now with activecampaign or with Convert Box. Before Convert Box, we were using a tool called OptinMonster, which isn't a bad tool. I don't, I don't mind it. I wasn't a huge fan of a lot of the designs of, like, the way the opt in forms looked. I thought they looked a little outdated to me. But then Convert box came along and.

Josh Bartlett, who were good buddies with, was an advisor on that. And so we actually kind of got a review copy of it. We kind of got to play around with it before some other people. So we put it up on our website instead of OptinMonster to test how it would do. And when we put it on our website, it basically. What did it double? Our opt in.

It doubled. Yeah, because you modeled it was the face. Yeah. A little trick you just voice? Yeah, yeah.

So basically.

It, we made it so like my face, it looks like my face is down in the corner and then the opt in is like a little bubble coming out of my face. So it kind of looks more like Intercom or one of those like, hey, do you need help or do you got questions? It kind of looks more like one of those boxes than it does an actual opt in form. And by switching over to that style, we literally doubled our opt in rate on our website.

So we should, we'll say in the show notes and probably in the action guide as well. We'll link to that blog post on our website.

Two blog posts, Two of them for convert box. Yeah. So sue, if you're listening to this, there's a Blog post about how Convertbox doubled our opt in rate. So let's link to that case study. And then there's another blog post that's called something like 30 Ways We Use convert box or something like that. And it is just a massive breakdown of here is all of the ways you can use convert box in your business.

So dang good man. It's like such a great tool because it, not only is it, you have a lot of ways to do this, it increases, it increased our conversions and I know it did for a lot of others too because we know a lot of people got it. But there's all this behavioral behavior kind of triggers and things that like we're talking about the journey. Well, based off of any opt in they they come in on, you can tag them differently in activecampaign you can have different things happen after that. You can have different convert boxes show up at for different people. Yeah. So if they're already in your email list, you could show them a different offer.

Yep.

If they're already a pro, say a customer of one of your products, well, you can sell them or show them things about the next product they should purchase from you. So it's always helping you further the conversation or get them, you know, to basically get something else from you. Yeah. That's relevant.

One thing we like to do is if you're already, if you're not on our email list, the convert box slide in that pops up is going to basically give you an offer to opt in and get on our email list. If you are already on our email list, the little slide in that's going to pop up, we're usually putting a relevant offer to whatever the post is that you're on. So for example, if you go to one of those convert box posts that we were talking about, if you're already on our list, you might actually see a link to go check out convert box in one of those slide ins. If you're not on our list yet and you go view that article, you might see an option to opt in to get on our list to get more tool recommendations. Right. So we're constantly able to automatically switch what's showing on these pages using convert box based on previous actions that people have talked about. And this is sort of going to become a theme. Right. Like we're really big on segmenting people and putting the right things in front of them in the right at the right time using automation.

Yeah. You're going to see it more and more and that's our evolution with email like we were kind of doing it archaic way by just sending broadcasts all the time. Yeah, we were segmented but like it wasn't dynamic. Yeah. Like how we're building it now and how Convert Box does it like on the front end. It's, it's cool. Cool thing about Convert Box, at least at the time of this recording, it is a one time fee. So there's no recurring. I know a lot of similar products do have recurring. They don't. And it's a solid team. Yeah, we know. Dean, the creator at Convert Box, our good friend Josh Bartlett from ThriveCart advised them like you said. So they're solid. And they keep updating all the time too. They rolled out some stuff the other week.

Yeah.

That people are like raving about.

Dude, every time I log in, there's something new that I didn't see the time before.

It's cool. It's easy too. That's. That's what's rad. And it's very affordable for what it does, you know? Absolutely. So Convert Box, is there like a quick way to just like shout out any of these URLs or. We're just going to direct people to the.

I would check out the Show Notes page because I'm not sure. Yeah, I mean, if I had to guess, if you went to hustleandflowchart.com convertbox, it'll probably take you there. But I don't know a hundred percent if we have that link set up properly.

Yeah. And partially I ask is because sometimes like Convert Box I think is like behind a kind of like a. Not a paywall, but you have to almost like be on an email list to get the opportunity to even purchase it.

It's not publicly available. It's in a private pilot program where only you, you can only get it if you're recommended by somebody else.

Right? Yeah. So make sure to check out the links in the Show Notes either at. On the website or get the action notes. No, I already said it. But Flowchart group.com and opt in, you will have the link there to go get the opportunity to get it perfect.

Thrive Architect is next.

Yes, that's what we use right now to sort of build all of our landing pages and opt in pages. And if you go to our blog, pretty much all of that's built on Thrive Architect. So that homepage that you see with me and Joe, like in the recording studio, and then it's got like featured podcast episodes and then it's got the latest podcast episode. I built that In Thrive Architect, if you look at our media page, our contact page, our resources page, all of that was built in Thrive Architect. And then any of our opt in pages, if you've opted in for our one of our books or you've opted in if you go to hustle and flowchart.com/comp where you get the companion that was built on Thrive Architect. Pretty much all these pages are built on Thrive Architect and it's, it's WordPress based, so you actually have to have WordPress installed. Then you install the Thrive Architect plugin. Right. I don't think it's a theme, I think it's a plugin.

Yeah.

You install the Thrive Architect plugin and it basically gives you like a drag and drop page builder.

But built inside of WordPress, it's super easy to use. Yeah, it's rad. I mean that's. Yeah, I've built a bunch of stuff. My wife has built a bunch of stuff with Thrive Architect too, so. And like she does not do any of this kind of stuff. Yeah. So you can pick it up out of the box and start building. Did you mention that we use it to deliver bonuses for products like that we sell as affiliates to.

We use Members Pro for that. Which we'll get to.

Well, no. So I guess present the bonuses. Present bonuses.

Oh yeah. Present the bonuses. Yeah. Yeah. So we make the landing pages that say, like if you grab convert box through our link, here's the bonuses you're going to get. We build those in Thrive Architect as well.

And you can see another example that I know works is thrivecart1. So like if you want to model our bonus page or anything, it's getthrivecart.com bonuses I believe. And that will take you to one of these pages that works extremely well for us. So if you want to see an.

Example of a page that makes us sales every single day, as for an affiliate product, that's a good one to go to.

Yeah. All righty. Okay. Alternative. We do have an alternative and there's multiple alternatives. There's a lot of different products. This is just the one we're using right now. Yeah. Groove Pages is one that we've, we've talked about on here before. Mike. Phil, same as the creator of that one of them. Yeah, it is a kind of a different type of alternative. It's actually a free version of it at least at the time of this recording. Yeah. And. Or at least a cheap version. But you could build, I think at the time that you recorded it's. Like three pages. Yeah.

I think with the free version, it's a page builder similar like ClickFunnels, so you don't need WordPress installed. That's why I put this one on the notes is like, if you're WordPress based, Thrive Architect. If you're not WordPress based, Groove Pages might be a good one to check out. Or ClickFunnels is the popular one that everybody sort of knows about. I have nothing against ClickFunnels. I think ClickFunnels is fine. We don't really use it as much anymore because I feel like we have slightly more control with Thrive Architect.

We're a different user type though too. Yeah. Some people just don't care about all the customizations and all that stuff.

Yeah. But Groove Pages is a good one. You can have like three landing pages, I think for free with Groove Pages and that could get you going as well. But yeah, if you, if you asked us what we use, we use Thrive Architect. If you're looking for like, what's the lowest barrier to entry just to go and like build something and get it up as quick as possible. Groove Pages or Click Funnels is going to be it.

Yep. Cool. All right, moving on. Now we got Members Pro. Yes. So this is a company shout out to Chris Benetti. So Chris, we partnered with Chris and the team over there at Members Pro and like you were saying that we're actually using that or basically that's going to be where all of our bonus content. Yeah. Is delivered after someone purchases, let's say thrivecart from us or Convert Box from us, our designer, we have these different tools with bonus packages. Well, after they purchase, there's a thank you page. It's all hooked up with whatever that program is that we make that sale. Yep. And. And then we kick them over to the bonus access area and we're in.

The process of moving that over now. So if, you know, I don't want you to be like, those guys are lying. They're not using it. If you, if you middle of it, we're in the middle of moving all of our stuff from another platform into Members Pro.

So.

And the reason we say this is an affiliate tool is because, like what you just said, this is where we house the bonuses. So like we mentioned, when you go to what is it? Get thrivecart.com/bonuses or whatever. You can see these are all the bonuses you get for signing up through us. Well, Members Pro is. Is this sort of protected members area where you're going to get Access to those bonuses.

Yeah.

And it's. As far as membership platforms go, like, the roadmap is fricking insane. Like, we're going to, I mean, all of our memberships are going to be moved over to Members Pro over time. So even members and stuff. Our platforms eventually going to be built on Members Pro. There is just some features we're waiting to roll out before we do that. But, like, this is going to be the most insane membership platform on the planet. If you heard the Chris Benetti episode, you got like the tip of the iceberg.

Well, yeah, I mean, we literally, and us as partners of that company, we're not developing or anything, but we're definitely influencing in terms of what we're seeing work best and. Yeah. How we would like to have something designed. So we're influencing Members Pro, which is rad. So that whole membership site or, you know, that whole software can actually be custom suited to affiliate marketers, for instance, it could also be for podcasters and other, you know, content creators of any types. Yeah, so it's, it's fun and we're very bullish on that just because it's, it's. We know it's needed for a lot of the, like, the kind of like convert box, it's like very dynamic, you know, like based off of what someone opens up. You can actually send them to maybe another offer that you have free paid. So it's like you can allow Members Pro to actually help you sell more stuff. Could even be as an affiliate. That's the stuff that we're gonna nerd out once we actually have bonus content all moved out.

It's gonna be the most dynamic sort of membership platform ever. But as far as like affiliate marketing uses, since the focus of this episode is really affiliate marketing.

I'm just saying some.

Yeah, well, yeah, but like the way we're using it right now, if we're talking like this is what we're currently doing, is we're going to be using Members Pro to deliver the bonus content when somebody buys an affiliate product through our link, because it's really easy to just send them right into Members Pro so they can go get access to all of these bonuses. And then inside of Members Pro, we can, you know, email people based on what bonuses they've written got and things like that. So all sorts of cool uses for Members Pro. But right now our main use is for these affiliate marketing purposes. And like you said, if you have a membership in there, it's. You can pretty easily segment and upsell people to Affiliate products and things like that.

Even as an affiliate, though. Yeah, you can do both.

Yeah.

So it's going to be. It'll be fun. And once we. Those features roll out and they roll out pretty dang soon, we'll definitely be telling you about the strategies that we're using there because I think it's going to be just really fun.

For real.

Snappa is our next software affiliate marketing related tool. Snappa's, that's how we make all of our images. That's how you see our episode images for the podcast for YouTube, thumbnails.

Different graphics that are used in, sorry, YouTube videos or any other videos.

Like all of it.

I don't think I've opened up Photoshop and I don't think you have or anybody else on the team in over a year maybe.

The last thing I remember making in Photoshop was this evergreen profits shirt.

That's at least been like three years, two and a half.

That's the last thing I remember making in Photoshop was this design.

I used to live in Photoshop and I loved it, but I was never that great at it.

Drink some water.

But like Snappa. Yeah. I mean, if you've heard of like Canva, I guess is a perfect alternative. But Snappa, we've actually had the owner, Josh on the podcast years ago now. It'd be interesting to bring them back on, but they've evolved that platform so much.

What was his last name?

Not he man, but starts with an H. I know that.

I can look it up if you talk.

Yeah. Because I thought the owner of Snappa was Chris something.

No, it's Josh something.

Okay, we should look that up so we.

No, I'm wrong. I'm totally wrong. I'm thinking of interactive page builder.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think his name was Chris.

You might be right.

Chris Gitmer.

Yes.

Gimmer.

Gimmer. That sounds familiar.

Now I feel really bad, but Snappa is an amazing tool.

It's been years, like, legit. We've interviewed a lot of people. Yeah. But we use Snappa every single freaking day. Or someone on our team does.

Actually, somebody on our team is in Snappa every day.

Yeah. Mainly Jacob.

Yeah. But I mean even, even like affiliate marketing purposes. Right. We use it for our bonus pages. Right. When you go to the bonuses and we're listing out the bonuses, we put little images next to each bonus. Those images were most likely made in Snappa.

It's like, why wouldn't you. It has the templates, it has the icons and all these Things that you'd probably buy from some stock photos site and then tweak around or maybe hire someone on Fiverr to do all this fancy graphic work. It's like, you don't need to do all that stuff. Just again, it's kind of like how we're recording this video right now on these tripods with the webcams and this really bad lighting. It's like we're just doing it. We get it uglier. But honestly, sometimes it's not ugly. That's the thing. It's actually really nice designs that are just easy. Yeah.

So we really couldn't do anything we do without some sort of images. And pretty much all of the images were using is they're inside of a Snappa. And any images that we can't like get within Snappa Deposit photo is a good resource for stock photos. That's usually where we get our stock photos.

Cool. New feature inside of Snappa which you can do in other places, but you can actually remove all the background. Yes, that's cool. Background images. So like literally you can have like baller headshots if you just go outside, like in your backyard. Even if your backyard is just like dirt. And that's cool. You can make it like a really. If you just have good lighting. The iPhone up here. Come on. Use your selfie tricks. Yeah. And like you can have yourself a nice headshot. Go to Snap. I've removed the background. You're like, wow, look, I could be in a nice boardroom. Yeah, yeah. Just giving you ideas for.

Yeah, no, the remove background thing is cool because it used to be multi step process. We'd get like headshots from guests and sometimes we want to remove the background just because the background's a little distracting on the image they sent us or something like that. So we had to usually go to one tool, remove the background, bring it into Snappa. But now Snappa just has that built in. You can just say remove the background on this image.

The time saver for sure. All right, now we talked about ahrefs before. We did. We did not go super deep. We talked about how you can learn from ahrefs. But Matt, talk about ahrefs and how that relates to how we're ranking stuff for affiliate marketing or maybe spotting opportunities. Yeah.

SEO.

Okay, so SEO, how do we do it? Matt, I know we've talked about it before, but in this realm you just use ahrefs. Okay, moving on. Next thing.

No, so we've mentioned this before on the show, but you know, we Drive affiliate income from multiple traffic sources. Right. The podcast being one, the email list being one, Facebook ads, Google Ads. We're constantly testing new traffic sources, but to this day, our number one traffic source is SEO. Right. SEO drives more traffic into our website than any of the other things we're doing, including sending email broadcasts to our lists.

It's kind of crazy when we dug down in Google Analytics and saw that we're like, oh, okay. And then we doubled down on it.

Yep.

And really looked into Ahrefs and saw what it was capable of. Yeah.

So the way we're doing that is we're kind of finding low hanging fruit keywords for our business and we're using Ahrefs to figure out which keywords to go after. And then we're also using Ahrefs to figure out. Okay, if we do want to go after these, what sites should we try to get backlinks from? What does the competition look like? How many backlinks does the competition have? You know, what.

The competitors sites, what things are they ranking for that I'm not ranking for? Right.

It gives you ideas.

It gives you all sorts of ideas. And I mean, we use ahrefs in so many ways that I feel like we could probably make a whole podcast episode on like literally just ways we use ahrefs.

Yeah. I mean, if you put all of our sponsors together, we probably podcast over the years.

But like, you know, the main ways. The thing that I do the most frequently with Ahrefs, I'll start there, is what we call the low hanging fruit strategy.

Right.

Which is we go inside of Ahrefs and we plug in the URL to our website. So we'll go in there, I'll plug in evergreenprofits.com and then there's an organic result section. You can click on the organic results section. It'll tell you all of the keywords your website is ranking for on Google right now. And it'll tell you how much search volume per month that keyword's getting and it'll tell you where you're currently ranking for it. Right. So what I like to do is go into Ahrefs, plug in our website, open up that report, and then put on some filters. And these filters might say something like, I only want to see keywords that get over 500 searches a month and that I'm on page two or three, four.

Right.

Or maybe page from page two to four.

Right.

So that's ranking number 11 through ranking number 50. Right. 11 through 50 would be page two through four. On Google. So I'll plug in those filters, keywords over 500 and keywords that I'm ranking on page two, three or four for on Google. Right. It's gonna give you a list of let's say 50 keywords. And these 50 keywords are all keywords that could get a lot of traffic if you got em to page one. And right now you're close to page one. So we go and grab that data and to get these keywords from like page two or three up to page one, we'll simply go to our website and link to whatever's article, whatever article is ranking. Right. So let's say for instance we have an article about Snappa, right. The snap, a review article that we wrote. So I can go in there, a snap, a review. This, this search query gets like 10,000 searches a month, let's say. And we, maybe we were on page two for it. So what I'll do is I'll go back to our website and I will link to that article from other articles that I've written using the keyword Snappa Review.

You're kind of giving it some love.

Yeah, I'm basically giving some more links to that article. I'm just doing that linking internally on our website and a lot of times just doing a whole bunch of internal linking using the keyword that you want to rank for and pointing it to the URL you're trying to get ranked a lot of times you give that a couple weeks and you'll notice the article that was, you know, in the 15th position on page two is now in the eighth position on page one.

And there's no surprise if you look at our show notes for every podcast episode. That's why we always in the intro writing area there, right below the audio player, there's a couple links to different episodes within our website, our own website that are linking irrelevant episodes. But that's just going to give us a better chance to rank higher for whatever keyword we're going after.

Yeah, and I do this with like the authors. You know how a lot of times we'll ask for like book recommendations and people will say, oh, I really love the E Myth by Michael Gerber. Well, guess what? We've now had Michael Gerber on the podcast. So everywhere that anybody's mentioned, I love the E Myth with Michael Gerber. I go back to those episodes and put another link in those episodes saying, you know, Michael Gerber episode or something like that.

That's right.

And doing that kind of stuff. We'll Start to see us climb the ranks for people searching for Michael Gerber or the E Myth.

It's a cool strategy. I mean that's like one of many. So yeah, we should. We should probably have a further SEO discussions around Ahrefs. I mean we do in a lot of these intros. So if you listen to them. Yeah.

What's a good SEO episode or maybe some extra.

So many good ones.

Name some.

So we had Nick and Rio.

I was going to mention them next.

Oh yeah, we'll mention them next because they're tool. We're actually going to talk about in a second the Stefan Spencer Brian Dean. Yep. We had Dave Sinek. We've had. I mean so many good Broughton Nick brought.

So yeah, if you go to our. Well, we'll link. Let's link those up too because honestly they're money and they all take different approaches.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. The Brian Dean one is really, really, really like in depth and then the Stefan Spencer one's pretty good because he gets into some of the more technical SEO type stuff too.

Yeah, he's like he wrote the book on SEO like that book and it changed all the time. So that's where a lot of these strategies. It's good to kind of keep this on top of mind. Yeah.

Matthew Woodward's another really good one too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he is a good one. Forgot about him.

Yeah.

But yeah, well, this is one of the strategies we'll definitely. Or topics we'll keep bringing on the show. Cool. So hrefs and again, I mean we already said it because they sponsored the show at the beginning. But if you do want to try it, there is a trial. It's for seven days for seven bucks. So a hrefs.com and next one is topic topic. So that is Nick and Rio. That is Nick who were on our show, I don't know, a month or so ago and that's usetopic.com is how do you find this thing? So this actually stems from. We met Jurgen from Polymash and this is from podfest. So just giving you a lineage of how we even found this tool. And essentially it brings this concept of comprehensive content as being one of the biggest factors that help you rank your website or your different blog posts and all that stuff in Google is if you're more comprehensive around whatever keyword that someone is searching for, you have a pretty high likelihood chance that you're going to be towards the top of the rankings and probably even beat some big, big websites with big authority, just with good content. Because you're solving a problem.

Yeah, I mean, this actually goes all the way back to like the Brian Dean episode we were talking about. Brian Dean has an amazing blog post all about what he called the Skyscraper strategy. And I'm pretty sure he coined that term. I. Not 100%, but I'm fairly positive referenced in it.

So probably.

Yeah, so I think that's his. His term. But the skyscraper strategy is essentially this. Write extremely comprehensive content on a specific topic. And if you ever read Brian Dean's blog, like you're talking 20,000 word articles.

It'S like a book in each one.

A blog post is like a book because whatever topic he's trying to write on, he's trying to make it the most exhaustive resource on that topic. So I think he's got like a blog post called like what works now at SEO in 2020 or something like that.

Right. And I think for 2020, I think he wrote specifically about comprehensive content as being like the number one biggest thing you could do.

Yeah, yeah. So coming back around to like use topic, right? Or topic is@usetopic.com but with topic, what you can do is you can basically, if you plug in a keyword that you want to try to rank for. Let's say what would be a good example of a keyword?

It could be any product name.

Yeah.

Any tool on this list. Let's say Members Pro.

Okay, so let's say we typed in Members Pro into Topic. What it'll do is it'll give us a content brief and it'll show us, okay, everybody that's ranking for Members Pro, here are the things they talk about in their content, right? Here is how long their articles are. Here are the things they talked about. Here are the things that are headlines in their content. Like here's what they're using the H2 and H3 tags on, right? It's going to. It basically looks at page one of Google and breaks down, it analyzes the content of those pages where Ahrefs kind of gives you like keyword ideas and suggestions and helps you figure that out. What this actually does is tell you this is what to actually write about in your content. Right? So this will actually say, okay, so the three of the. The pieces of content that are ranking for Members Pro on Google right now, three of them are talking about Members Pro versus Clickfunnels. So make sure you work Members Pro versus clickfunnels into your content somewhere. Right? Two of the ones that are ranking are rank. You know, they have content in there. About Members Pro pricing. So make sure you touch on Members Pro pricing in your article. And it sort of breaks down like the things that are ranking are talking about this. So if you want to be the most successful at ranking, talk about all of it.

It's literally a cheat sheet because, yeah, it runs you through that whole audit thing or whatever it is, and spits out exactly what you should be doing. Yeah.

And there's really two ways to use it.

Right.

You can plug in a keyword and it'll give you a brief for that keyword about, here's what's on page one and here's what they did. But the other way is if you've already written an article, you can actually import the article into Topic and it will tell you what you need to do to optimize the article. So you import the article, you plug in the keyword. So let's say we had an article about Members Pro right now, and we plugged in the Members Pro keyword and we imported our article. It will analyze everything in Google that's ranking for page one, and then it'll tell you what you are doing good and what you aren't doing good. And it will actually grade you on it. It'll say, okay, you know, 50% of the pages are talking about this. You're also talking about that. That's Good. Right. But 60% of the pages are talking about this. You're not. That's bad. Make sure you're talking about that. And then as you actually update your content, topic will upgrade your grade for you, and it'll say, okay, now you're a B plus. Now you're an A minus. Now you're an A plus. Now you're an A plus plus.

Right.

And if you just go through and make sure that your content is talking about every thing that everybody else on page one is talking about, then you're much more likely to end up on page one as well, because you are the most comprehensive option.

I love it. Yeah. So they. They were on the podcast as well, Nick and Ryu. So.

And they'll probably explain it better than I did. So.

Different words. So, yeah, check them out there. Because they're using a lot of AI. Yeah. And all this just advanced technology in SEO.

Yeah.

So it's like you might as well do the best you can on your own website. And they're basically giving you the cheat codes for that. And they're the ones that are constantly optimizing like, hey, what this thing should be comparing to competitors out there. It's like Ahrefs. It's like using their site audit. They have a whole audit feature. So it's always gonna show you what's up to date with your site. How can you improve all these tools? This is why we use these tools, because they're basically giving us a lens into stuff we just don't pay attention to. Yeah.

And, you know, spinning it back around to affiliate marketing. The way we're generating a lot of affiliate income is through articles.

Right.

We generate income through, you know, talking about ThriveCart and some of our content, talking about Convert Box and some of our content, talking about all. All the various tools that we're talking about. On this episode. We probably have content floating around out there. So we want to rank on page one for things like.

Members Pro and Members Pro review and some of the. And Convert Box. And Convert Box Review. So we really, really, really put a lot of focus into SEO when we're creating content because we want to make sure that that content is going to generate affiliate commissions in perpetuity without us having to actually pay for that traffic for sure.

Yeah. No. What better? And it's targeted too. That's the cool thing. So cool. So topic is absolutely killer. Deadline Funnel is the next tool we have here. So Deadline Funnel was created by Jack.

Bourne, which that episode actually went live on the day we're recording.

That's right. Yeah. So go check out that interview too. You see a trend here. Actually use the stuff that we're talking about.

It's really cool to talk to the, you know, the founder. Yeah. And they get some cool strategies. But I mean, this is why we're bringing these people on. So Deadline Funnel, it's countdown timers, it's putting scarcity, urgency, all this to your offers. And if you're an affiliate marketer, you know, like us, we'll put that to a specific bonus package that we're offering or if there is legitimately a deadline to that offer, maybe it's a pricing change or whatever. We'll stick those bonus. Sorry, those countdown timers kind of like wherever we can in our marketing or messaging emails as well. Right. I mean, we're just now starting the Use Deadline Funnel again. But like, we've used countdown timers in a variety of different ways, in many ways. And urgency. But this is going to basically make it way easier.

And I'm sort of laughing in my head a little bit because I just got this image of Perry Belcher. I remember we were watching him speak on Spade at. On stage at like tnc. Or something like that. And he actually brought up countdown timers. And he's like, I like to put countdown timers on, on web pages. And somebody came up to the microphone and said, hey, what pages should I put countdown timers on and which one shouldn't I? And he went, man, countdown timers are like hot sauce. I put that shit on everything.

I love hot sauce. So I wouldn't argue with that. That's awesome. I mean like, it's true. And like if you have a tool that helps you kind of sync all that up, I mean, looks bad if you have countdown timers on different pages that are all different times, he's like, don't do that.

And that's why Deadline Funnel works so well, is because it syncs it up. So I'm sure you've received those emails in your inbox where there's literally a countdown in your email.

Right.

Have you ever, have you ever, have you ever had this happen to you where you have a countdown in your email and then you go and click on the link and there's a countdown on the page that you just clicked over to, but the countdown is like a day different than the countdown in the email.

I think it literally happened when we interviewed Jack Bourne that day. I was going through my emails and I was like, that's amateur hour, man.

Yeah, well, deadline funnel is what that fixes. The deadline funnel fixes that. It makes sure all the timers are actually all synced up.

I mean, look how bad that looks though, to that. Because there's some big marketers. It's like, what do you just like literally you're throwing out your reputation to save a few bucks.

Yeah.

And like just use a tool that actually does this and does it ethically. Yeah. Because that's when you listen to Jack Bourne's episode, he's all about that. Yeah. You know, he's not in it to just like, let's just put countdown timers or fake scares. Like. No. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, just don't, don't. Well, don't, don't cop yourself out in your reputation along with, you know.

Yeah, well, the thing with countdown timers is you see it all the time where people just have this 24 hour countdowns and it's like, if I go on Tuesday, I have 13 hours left and then I go to the website on Wednesday and I go in the morning and now all of a sudden I have 19 hours left. Well, what just happened? Right, like they're just using a countdown that just resets every Day. And what you think nobody picks up on that?

Word will get around, folks.

But deadline Funnel can actually remove access. Right. So, like, we will put Deadline Funnel on a bonus page and say, hey, go get these. This product by this time and you can get our bonuses. And when the timer runs out, if you click on the link, it'll say, this promotion has ended. And even though it's just ended, to you, somebody else that came in maybe a couple days later, they got the same time window. But if they don't buy it within that time window, that offers closed for them. So it is true scarcity. It's just individualized scarcity. Yeah.

It's a custom path again. It's like seeing a big trend here. If you can carve out. And this is why we honestly invest in a lot of these tools. It's like if you can create this perfect journey for your. Your. Your customer, your prospect, like whoever's coming through that online, just remember there's a person over there. And if there are tools, if you string them up together and think about the process, you can make that the most enjoyable journey for someone. And they're gonna grow so much trust with you. Even as an affiliate, like we do, you're like, there's ways that we could still do this without even selling our own products. And still that's why they will buy more stuff from us. Yep. And I think that's the big thing with affiliate marketing. We're not in it to just one product. Like, that's why we're stringing together a ton of ways to, hey, use this with this thing. And here's why. Here's how we're doing it. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you basically web it all together. Yeah. I mean, that's. And the deadline funnel is just gonna. It's the hot sauce.

Yep.

I'm not gonna eat Mexican food without hot sauce.

Yep.

You need deadline funnel. You've got.

But I won't eat Mexican food without a countdown.

All right, this last tool is actually kind of a one that I.

Last tool. I have two more in the.

Oh, there is two more. Shoot, I skipped over one.

I actually wrote down a couple more mentions. Quick mention.

We could do that too. I'll allow it.

Thank you, Judge Matt, Go ahead.

All right, so the next tool is actually a freeze all tool.

Yeah. Yeah, the last one too.

Oh, yeah, they both are. Yeah, we're getting the last two or wrapping up with some freebies. All right, so pretty link. We use pretty link fricking daily.

Daily. It was like all the time.

So Pretty Link is Basically, it's a WordPress plugin, but it's a link shortener. So, you know, you see affiliate links that are like just these long string of like weird, crazy numbers and letters.

And emojis and weird emojis yet.

But yeah, but if we were on this podcast and we were promoting Deadline Funnel, for instance, we don't want to have to say, all right, go to www.deadlinefunnel.com aff/138246 14. Right.

Did you remember that?

I'm just making shit up.

I'm just kidding. But.

But, you know, but what Pretty Link does is makes it so we can make a link that's like hustle and flowchart.com deadline. And if you go to hustleandflowchart.com deadline, it redirects to that long, crazy link that I just said.

Right.

And so that's in the basic sense what Pretty Link does. As podcasters, it's something that we wouldn't be able to live without because we can't shout out links without something like pretty LinkedIn for sure.

Yeah. And key tip. If you are going to do affiliate marketing and audio or all that stuff, make sure that you create that link ahead of time, you know, because it might be taken in your website, you know, or if you go on other people's podcast. This is how we use it. Like even, you know, just to get more traffic to our. Our thing. And this is part of our affiliate marketing strategy is going on Relevant podcast. Go shout out. Like, we'll shout out our traffic book or affiliate marketing book, and it'll be something like hustleandflowchart.com traffic or traffic book. I don't know, it's probably both of those. But that's an example. And then, boom, Opt in page. Sometime a custom opt in page that show.

Your heart's content. There you go.

There is a pro version. You can get by with the free version just fine. It'll do exactly what we just said it would. The pro version has some cool features if you want to get ninja with it.

Right.

So you can actually put like retargeting pixels in there. So if somebody clicks on a specific link, you can actually have it drop a pixel when they click that link. So let's say we shut out hustleandflowchart.com deadline and that goes to our Deadline Funnel link. Well, it isn't set up like this right now, but if it was set up, I can have it. So it fires our Facebook Pixel when you click that link. And now when you go on Facebook you might see an ad for Deadline Funnel from us because we know you just click that link over to Deadline Funnel. And so you can do some cool segmentation with advertising and Facebook pixels and, and stuff like that. With the pro version, I also think it has like a little bit more granular tracking and stuff. But really the reason you'd upgrade is to be able to do that kind of stuff where you can add additional tracking codes in.

Cool. I like it. Pretty link. That's it there. Last one on the official list is Loom.

Loom.

L o o M. Yeah, this one.

Is interesting because this is something that I don't think most people would ever consider part of an affiliate marketing tool. But I feel like you use it so much to close fricking affiliate sales.

It happens all the time. It's ridiculous. And I'll tell you exactly how I do it. It's nothing fancy, but it's personalized videos to people asking questions and instead of me writing or some other people on our team sometimes do this, help us out. But instead of just writing a response which is cool and helpful, shoot a video. Even if it's a fast question and answer thing where it literally could be answered in like a. You know, here's a blog post that I wrote about this. It's all there. Like yes, you could totally do that. But like why not send them a quick 30 second minute long video introducing yourself and why they should actually buy from you in the first place and how they're going to get even more value if they did purchase from you. So the way that we use it in our business, the most common thing is we actually have a Facebook group around ThriveCart. ThriveCart Power Users is the name. And then on there there is a question when someone asks to join if they have a question around ThriveCart. Forget the exact wording, but it's on there really. It was there for us originally to get some ideas for content, remember? Because we didn't want to think of what we should make anymore. Might as well poll the audience. Exactly. But then we quickly realized, and then we also ask, are you a customer of ThriveCart? Yes or no? And we realized there's a lot of no's starting to come through. And I think it was me. I was like, dude, I feel like there's an opportunity to close some sales here just by being cool and helping people. So I don't know, I just tested it and then I started and it's now been a good year and a half, maybe even more by doing this. And essentially now we have it more dialed in where Jacob on our team will check the group every day and he'll send me screenshots of the people who asked a question that sounds like a buying type of question. So they say, no, they're not a user of ThriveCart yet. And here's their question. And usually it's like, integrations. Is it going to work with this tool? Is it going to. Can it do this? How do I do this? I'm like, usually they're super easy. Yeah. And yes. Maybe I'll write a. Take them to a blog post and just say, like, hey, it's Joe from the ThriveCart Group. We're affiliates. We also have been using the product for, like, since day one. Mm. I can answer pretty much any of your questions. Here's what I think about your thing. Blah. You know, here's where to get some content. Oh, don't forget, we have some killer bonuses to really get you up to speed right away so you don't have to spend a lot of money and, like, be out a lot. You're, like, in profit fast. Yeah. And yada, yada, yada, call to action, sayonara. And then email me back if you need any help. Almost always it's like, holy crap, you. You made me a video. How freaking cool. And so helpful that was. And a lot of the times they ended up purchasing it's pretty dang high percentage.

Well, there's like this whole reciprocity thing going into effect as well, where they asked you a question, you came back, went above and beyond what they anticipated to answer that question. Right. Like, you went above and beyond in the form of speaking personally to them, making a video that they are the only other person on earth who's probably going to see that video. And you're tailoring the answer to what they asked. You're answering their question. They're going, man, this guy spent time out of his day to specifically help me. Now I'd kind of feel bad if I didn't buy the product from him.

Maybe. I mean, it's probably.

I mean, that's not the goal.

Right.

The goal isn't to, like, you know, guilt them into buying through us. But it's like that, I think, is what kind of happens psychologically through giving these videos to them is they go, man, that guy really went out of his way. Well, now if I do buy it, I'm definitely buying it through his link.

Yeah. And That's. That's really all we're trying to do is like, okay, if this person is interested in this tool, yes, there are other affiliates out there, albeit none of them are doing this. I will tell you that. For years now, probably almost five years, four years of us just kind of going up and beyond.

Above and beyond.

Above and beyond. I was going to say further and beyond. No, that's not right. Above and beyond. Just do. This is totally above and beyond. It's personalization, I think, at its best. And you're not interrupting anybody. You're literally helping them unexpectedly. And then you're doing it with a video and you're like, what? It's a loom.

Super effective. And it's something that I want to say we've pioneered, but I'm sure other people are out there doing it.

Yeah, who knows? But go. Go get Loom. It is free. They've been adding a whole bunch of stuff, actually just last week. But, you know, we pay for. I think it's like 10 bucks a month. Yeah. And you don't have to. You don't have to know. I had the free version a lot, but the paid allows you to do some extra stuff.

I think the video quality is higher or something like that, which does come.

In handy because it does, like, make it a little grainy if you're trying to show specific little words.

Oh, like screen sharing and stuff. Yeah.

I think it's good to upgrade. If you end up actually using it, it's worth the 10 bucks, let's be honest. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, another little thing we do is Joe sends a loom video to every single guest that comes on the podcast and just thanks them for being on the show. I mean, not really sort of affiliate marketing implications. Just another cool way we use loom.

Well, it is kind of. Actually. It is, because I asked them typically, hey, do you have any way that we can help you? We love to promote, you know, our friends stuff and stuff that we want to share and that's relevant. So a lot of times it's asking like, hey, do you have something for us to promote?

Yeah, that's true.

It is mining.

And then it is mining for products to promote.

It's mining for them. And typically we'll get a much better deal out of it. We'll get a custom landing page or.

And a lot of times a free copy of whatever the product is or free stuff.

I mean, again, those are the people. Like, every single one of them reply with like, holy. Even if they're assistants I'll always say, like, can you pass this to whoever you know? And that's rare, typically, that we're going one on one. But yeah, like, it's. And they're always like, holy crap. Now we're top of mind of the people, the product owner side. And then I mean, there's. Yeah, this sets us up to do more collaborations in the future and just set up a good relationship. Yeah. Top of mindness again, for sure. I think it pays off big time in the long run. Yep.

So you have some bonus tools that are a surprise to me.

Well, I don't like surprises, Joe. I know you're very like, yeah, if I didn't write it, you know, you don't know.

I'm curious because that just means there's stuff that I forgot.

Well, one you had on the list yesterday when I saw this, but then it's not on the list, so. ThriveCart.

Yes. So here's why I had ThriveCart on the list. And then I think I just forgot to copy and paste it over onto our notes.

I was feeling. Cause I'm like, I don't know why you wouldn't.

But here's the thing.

Go ahead.

ThriveCart isn't really something we use to promote affiliate products, but ThriveCart is probably the best platform if you are trying to get affiliates to promote your product.

Correct. So if you have the product or a product, use ThriveCart to get. Or to basically manage all your affiliate marketing stuff. Yeah. You know, for affiliates to actually promote your product, ThriveCart is what we use. That's a lot of the products we actually, you know, sell as affiliates are using ThriveCart as the affiliate program as well.

Just by coincidence. But it's also because it's our best platform out there.

Yeah. But it works great. It's going to help you manage all that stuff. So if you actually have a product and you're here thinking about like, hey, I want to get affiliates and get them to actually help me promote my stuff. Well, use ThriveCart. We've helped a lot of people with that or pointed that direction. And getthrivecart.com is our site that kind of walks through a lot of that stuff. Yeah.

And in fact, getthrivecart.com, a lot of what we were talking about with Ahrefs and Used Topic and the SEO stuff and a lot of these other tools. If you were to go to getthrivecart.com, you would see what we're Talking about. Because almost everything we've talked about on this episode is being implemented on that website.

It's a perfect case study.

Exactly.

So, sue, please put that in the notes. Is like, hey, here's your case study website. Just go there. Everyone should just go there. The last one on my list, and this is like not a tool, but it will be soon, is Unicorn Equity. I just wanted to give a shout out because this is a company that Matt and I are partners in and I actually saw a text message just coming from Roland Frazier, who's another partner of it. So I wanted to throw it out here because it is a. And we have a whole episode on that as well. Podcast episode. So if you type in Roland or just Unicorn Equity would get you there. It's a platform where Matt and I are assisting on recruiting affiliates to use Unicorn Equity to. Essentially we have SaaS, founders and software products on the other side, bringing those two together in a marketplace scenario. So it's just like an affiliate arrangement. In addition, there's some equity involved so you can earn cash commissions as an affiliate and equity in that software company that you're promoting. This is not live at the time of this recording, but it's getting close. Yeah.

If you do go to unicornequity IO, you could get on the list to get updated when it is ready.

Yeah. So check it out. I just wanted to throw it out there as like, if you're an affiliate looking and you can even just. Just look at the animated video on there. You might recognize us in the voice.

It basically shows you like, hey, affiliates are kind of keeping a lot of money on the table or leaving a lot of money on the table. You can actually earn a stake in that company through your promotion efforts. That's the goal with Unicorn. It launches roughly. We're aiming for beginning of 2021 and maybe some. Some cool affiliate tools, which we'll keep up our sleep for now, maybe later this year. That's all I have, Matt. Cool.

Well, I think.

I'm sure there's a. I mean, we could talk about tools all day. Like, I'm sure.

Yeah, I think we're good, man. We don't need to overload them.

As far as affiliate marketing, I really wanted to focus in on, like, okay, what makes us successful as affiliate marketers. If we're looking from a tool perspective, what tools have probably had the biggest impact on the sales that we make through affiliate products. And the list here is kind of what we came up with. Like, these are the tools that we use pretty Constantly, pretty consistently, to generate affiliate commissions through our business.

I guess the other one that like Designer, we'll just toss it out there. We don't use it a lot, but it has definitely been used a lot with affiliate stuff.

Yeah, that's true.

Because we so Designer. It's very inexpensive, which is amazing. And why really everyone should get it. It's allowing you to take something like a YouTube video. You might decor around an affiliate tutorial or bonus video, which we do a lot for. For some products. You could toss that inside a Designer and have it convert the transcript and an ebook and give you basically another form of content you can now use to publish on your website. Go publish on SlideShare or Speaker Deck or whatever that issue.

We've had scenarios where we're promoting an affiliate product. We wrote a blog post about the affiliate product and then we used Designer to convert it to a PDF. I took the PDF of that blog post, put it on SlideShare. Our blog post itself never actually ranked for the thing that we were trying to rank for, but the SlideShare article did. The PDF version of it did rank, and it still had all of our affiliate links. All of like all of that stuff was still within the PDF. But we were able to rank basically by borrowing the authority of a different site. But content that we've already written, it's perfect.

Yeah, so I wanted to toss it in there. That just seemed right. So Designer is. How do you spell that, Matt?

D. Well, it's design, but with an rr. So D, E, S, I, G, N.

R, R. Yeah, so no E at the end, it's rr.com or just again, action guides. We hook in, there's bonuses. That's.

Yeah, we'll link it up because we do have some bonuses.

That's actually why I thought of that. I guess I was like, wait, okay, I want to mention the ones that we actually have bonus packages around just in case. Convert box is one of those. Designer is one of those. Thrive cart. Thrive Cart that we mentioned. And the other ones we don't because they're not all affiliate links either. So we are going to be working.

On putting together an activecampaign bonus package because we're like pretty bullish and excited about some of the stuff we're building out in ActiveCampaign and we're excited to share that with people. So this kind of brings me to sort of a final kind of closing point is that when it comes to affiliate marketing, we're not actually.

I don't want this to come across as, like, hey, these are all tools that you should go buy because we want to get affiliate commissions off of you. The way that we literally see affiliate marketing is we get really excited about the stuff that we encounter, right? We. We go and play with a new tool. We play around with Deadline Funnel, and we go, holy crap, this is so freaking cool. I just need to tell people, right? We. We get access to ActiveCampaign and we get on a phone call with Joe Kearns and he's like, did you know you can do this with it?

No.

Did you know you could do this with it? No. Did you. Did you know you could do this, this, this, and this? Dude, you just blew my mind, right? I need to go tell people about this. And so the reason we've been effective with affiliate marketing and the reason we've leaned into affiliate marketing is because we're very excitable people who, whenever we see stuff, like shiny objects that we go, oh, that's really cool. We just want to tell everybody else about it. And that is, like, truly our motives. But if, you know, if we could make an income by doing the thing that lights us up, we're gonna try to make an income by doing the thing that lights us up. And that's what's led us down this path. But I, I always. There's always this little bit of like, oh, I need to make this disclaimer. But, you know, at the end of the day, if none of these things were affiliate links of ours, we'd probably still be making this episode going. You need to go check out this tool.

True. Good point. Good disclaimer. But, yeah, and know that there's a lot more than just, you know, we would make this podcast anyway. And that's why this thing even exists, actually, is the podcast. And it's just can't stop talking about cool stuff that we find, cool stuff.

That we learn, cool people that we meet. Like, when we meet awesome people. How often have you gotten on a phone call with somebody and then came to me on slack going, I just talked to this guy for two hours. He needs to come on the podcast. Like, and it's like somebody that, like, I'd never heard of, that's not like a big name guru or something like that. You're just like, I love this conversation. We need to share this guy's brain with the world.

Happens often.

Yeah.

So I think that's all we got. Man. This is a good episode.

I think so.

I liked it. It's been requested many a times as.

Soon as we learned to ignore the cameras, it turned into a better episode.

I'm happy. I don't think I've looked at it once. I'm going to keep it that way. I broke my stare you on YouTube. Thank you for watching and thank you for listening. This has been fun. Again, I want to give a shout out to the flowchartgroup.com action guides. Get the action guide for this episode. It's free. Two weeks of this going live and you'll have the list of all this stuff and a lot more. And also references to these other podcasts and other content pieces that kind of give you more strategy.

One final tool and yes, one final tool. Easy Webinar, one of the sponsors of this show.

Correct.

We don't do as much webinars these days as we used to do, but when we do webinars, we still go to easy Webinar. Easy Webinar. The reason I like Easy Webinar is because you've got platforms out there that are designed for automated webinars. You've got platforms out there that are designed for live, and then you've got stuff that does like hybrid webinars. Well, Easy Webinar is like the all in one place to do all of them. You don't have to buy three separate products to do these different types of webinars. If I record a live webinar and that live webinar just fricking crushes it, right? I don't want to go try to remake the magic of that live webinar. I want to use that, that same webinar again. So if that webinar crushed it, guess what? I can now turn that into an automated webinar and send people to my highest converting webinar that I've done so far.

Right?

And I don't think a lot of. I think there's a lot of people that are like, no, only live. Gotta be only live. And there's some people that are only automated webinar. Why not do live webinars every once in a while, but as a way to try to beat the control on your automated webinars. If we were running a lot of webinars, that's how we do it.

Well, you used to do it that way.

That's how we did it with Learn to Blog. Yeah, Learn two Blog. That was exactly. Our process was we had an automated webinar running every single day. And about once a month we'd do another live webinar. If it out converted our previous webinar that was running. We replaced the automated webinar and if it didn't out convert it, we'd go, okay, that one wasn't as good. Keep running the one that's running perfect.

Right?

And you can do that with. You can do both the live and the hybrid and the automated webinar with Easy Webinar. And I know he's hooking up Hustle and Flowchart listeners over@easywebinar.com hustle. He's got a discount, a percentage off for listeners of the show.

So fat discount over there. Yeah, fatty, fatty. Yeah. Easy webinar.com hustle that is all my friends.

Yes, it is.

That's collective because I'm talking to just one person at a time through the video audio. And you, Matt.

Thank you, my friends.

That's right.

I'm calling Joe. My friends.

Kind of weird, huh? Go share this episode around for another folk. Another folk. Another person that might. I don't be interested in affiliate marketing or you think they're just like, hey, they're struggling. It's that friend that's like, hey, what's that tool that you know, Remember that one time you told me about this tool? Or what do you think I should use for. Just send them this episode.

Exactly.

Just share it and leave us a review.

You don't have to answer people's questions anymore. Just point them to the podcast episodes of ours that answer those questions already.

CEO of no bro.

The CEO of no. Which is a great article.

We will link that maybe in the notes as well.

But yeah, if you have anybody who's interested in affiliate marketing or is doing affiliate marketing, send them to these episodes. We're going to be talking a lot more about affiliate marketing in upcoming shows. Thank you. Thanks everybody for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliff's Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com, find this episode that you just listened to, and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening. Go get it.

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