The Long Forgotten Power of Correct Affiliate Marketing Implementation
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- What's up everybody? I wanna talk today about one of, it's so funny, there's so many ways we drive traffic, so many things we talk about. Everyone's always freaking out about Facebook ads and Google and Instagram and YouTube, but to this day, more than 50% of the traffic to ClickFunnels still comes from this one traffic source that we never talk about. At a recent event, I kinda went off on this and I talked for, I don't know, 45 minutes or so, talking about how to get traffic from affiliates, what we're doing and how it works. And it was funny to me because we used to have this conversation back

when I first got started, because there wasn't Facebook, wasn't Instagram, like the way we all got traffic when we first got started was through affiliates. So all of our conversations, all the seminars, all the events were just talking about that one topic. And nowadays I go to an event and nobody's talking about it, yet it's still the way that we use to drive the majority of our traffic.

despite the fact we're spending a million dollars plus a month on paid ads. And so I wanted to go deep with that and just get you guys the wheels of your heads re-spinning about how to use affiliates to start growing your companies, to drive more traffic, to get sales. The best thing about affiliates is that like,

you know, with Zuckerberg, you buy ads, you give them money up front, whether people buy or not with affiliates, the risk is on them. Like you convince them to promote, they promote. And if they make a sale, then you pay them a percentage of the sales. There's no risk. There's no stress. Like it's such a better way to run and build and grow a business. So that said today, we're going to dive deep into some strategies about building your own affiliate program and getting other people to promote your products and your services for you.

Okay, how many of you guys right now have an affiliate program inside of your businesses that's active? Okay, interesting. How many of you guys do not?

So we have more of the do not than the do. Okay. Um, all right. Uh, a couple of things. Number one is back in the day when I got started 20 some odd years ago, we didn't have Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. Um, we have any of those things, right? And it's funny cause I think back to like, how did we get traffic back then? Only thing we really had, we had email lists.

They're Google ads. And that was about it. And so usually what happened, people would buy Google ads to build an email list and then you promote each other's things. Like 90% of the way we got traffic back 20 years ago was all, uh, us doing joint ventures. I guess what everything was getting affiliates, calling people on the phone, which me as a super introverted person who's number one fear on this planet is picking up the phone. Um, I had to like stretch to be able to do that, but it's the only way that we can grow our companies. And so, um, I built a lot of relationships with people and that's how I kind of how I kick things off.

And it was doing the, um, doing a lot of joint ventures where I'd promote their product. They promote ours, things like that.

Fast forward then, whatever, 10, 12 years later is when we launched ClickFunnels. And when we launched ClickFunnels, we did not do any advertising. We had no one on Team New Advertising. We didn't have, we weren't running Facebook ads, like none of that stuff. The only thing we had, the only tool we had was Joint Ventures. And so some of you guys had asked me kind of how we structure things initially when we launched ClickFunnels. So I'll talk about that first. And I'm going to show you the evolution of what we're doing that's really exciting. And this evolution, by the way, the whole goal of

All the things I'm trying to do in my business right now are how do I do things where I can cut Zuckerberg off? And so the whole idea came from that. And now it's turned into something really, really cool. I think you're going to love. So, okay. So the first launch of ClickFunnels, number one thing we did is... Yes, the Dream 100. We did the Dream 100. Just like I tell everyone over and over again. I did the Dream 100. And I was like, how do I get...

the information that we're launching this thing in front of people's faces. And so back then I'd seen somebody online who'd done a video card. Now they're kind of famous, but no one had done it before. I saw it in some weird industry where someone had these video cards. We have a message, you open it and the video starts playing. And so when we're launching ClickFunnels, it's like, we need to do these video cards. And it was really hard because there's only one person, I think in Hong Kong, who's actually making these things. We found the company and so we made it. So first thing we did is we did these video cards for our Dream 100. That was how we kind of kicked off.

awareness that we were launching a company called ClickFunnels. That's how it started. And then, you guys have heard the story before. We launched it first, where everyone was promoting free trial, and it didn't really convert, and no one knew what ClickFunnels was, and it was confusing, and just it kind of, we launched with affiliates, and the ones who promoted it just kind of died, and it didn't do a lot, right? Dang it. And then fast forward a few months later is when I had a chance to go to an event. I wrote the webinar pitch for ClickFunnels, did the webinar, it converted, and now it's like we had a model, right?

Anyway, I'm not gonna go deep in the whole model, but obviously, you know, webinar, linchpin, all that kind of stuff. But we had a webinar. So what we do is I go out there, I would do the webinar, first do it to our own list, made as much money, and I had the stats. It was like, hey, I did the webinar, we got 1,000 people to register, we made X amount of dollars, therefore I made, for everyone who registered, we made, you know, whatever the numbers were. And we had like a little database of just like, here's what we made from this webinar.

So then I had that, I was able to take that and I went to a joint venture partner, an affiliate. I'd say, Hey, I just did this webinar to my list. I was able to get a thousand people register. Here's the stats. Here's the numbers. If you can get a thousand people, this is what you probably make. Right? And so I tell them, you know, based on these numbers, you might make $5 for everyone who registers for webinar, whatever the numbers were. Right? So I pitched to somebody else and they liked it. Like, Oh, that sounds great. Let's do the webinar. We set the webinar. They would promote it. I would do the webinar. They make a bunch of money. And then what happened? We take that and we add it to this document. There's like

here's, here's results for my webinar. Here's results from the webinar I did with this person. And then I would go to that person and I told him, I say, uh, each of our partners would get 40% commission on the webinar, right? So that, Hey, he's got 40% commission. Um, did it convert well for you? Like, yeah, it was amazing. People loved it. It converted great. I was like, awesome. Um, we have a two tier affiliate program. So if you have anybody, you know, who would like to do this webinar, I will pay you 10% of any of the sales that they make.

And people are like, this is amazing. So then all of a sudden they would go and they would contact all their friends. Like, Hey, I just did Russell's webinar. I, you, we made $6 for every register, whatever the numbers were. They kind of brag about it and say, do you want to do a webinar with Russell? And they would connect to me with all these different people. So they might connect me with five different people. Those type people come to me and then I would do webinars to them. So I did a webinar, a person's list, that person, that person, right? And the person who did the webinar got 40% commission and the person referred them got 10%. So everyone's happy.

Then I took the data from all those five webinars. I put it on the sheet. So this was a webinar. We got, they got 300 registrants. We made $12 per lead, whatever. So we get building out this document of just all the case studies of what happened, right? And then those five people, I asked the same question. Hey, we have a two chair affiliate program. Do you have any friends who you think would want to promote this webinar? And all of them do. People who have what, who do webinars, know people who do webinars. And they're like, yeah, definitely. Here's three of my friends that do the webinar. So they introduced me, they introduced me, they introduced me, and they kept going and going and going. And that's how I did so.

70 whatever webinars in the first live webinars, the first couple of months of launch launching ClickFunnels was that that was the process and the path to your affiliate program, 40% of first tier commission, 10% second tier. And then we do a webinar, have success, get their friends, do webinar and just kept growing from there. Does that make sense? So that's how we launched ClickFunnels, how it started growing. Uh, we've paid out, I think over $150 million in affiliate commissions since ClickFunnels first launch. And that was kind of the initial, the initial process. Okay. Yeah.

Um, so hopefully it gives you guys a couple ideas if you're running different affiliate programs. All right. Now there's like three or four things that make this last thing make sense. So they may seem disconnected as I tell you three stories, but very, and I promise it'll tie together. It's like a nice boat. Okay. Number two, um, the very, when I reopened inner circle the very first time, um, like three years ago, how many guys were in the room three years ago? We first did it.

Okay, thank you very much for hanging out this long. It was over in the knitting factory. And if you remember, Anthony Morrison spoke. How many of you remember that?

He streamed it because he wasn't able to come. It's in the members area, by the way, if you haven't listened to this. But he shared this model and what he's doing. And Anthony's one of our, he was our number one affiliate for like five years inside of ClickFunnels. And actually, it's interesting. The top five affiliates are all using a variation of this model perfectly. So I had Anthony come and share that. He shared the model with everybody, and I haven't yet to see anybody actually do what he did, including me. And I've listened to that probably three times over the last couple of years. I'm like, I know there's something I just need to do it. I need to do it.

So I'm going to walk you through what Anthony's model is. It's really powerful. So Anthony has a site called Partner with Anthony. P-W-A-N-T-H-O-N-E-Y.

And Anthony basically has a site and he charges $7 a month to be cut, to join the site. You sign up for it and it's a training program. It's going to teach you how to be successful as an affiliate marketer. Right? And you go into the site and there's a whole like train program, like a day. Number one, you're going to do these things. Day number two, do these things. And he walks you through and it's got like a, I don't know, 40, 50, 60 day free training, not free training course, $7 a month for this training course. But he doesn't, but he's,

that's the only thing he sells is the $7 a month. That's the only product that Anthony actually has. Everything else is just, he's referring different things. Okay. And so this is how he became a number one affiliate is on like day three or something. He's like, Hey, you need to funnel. Here's a share funnel link that you need to have. Go sign up for click funnels and go get your thing. And he pushes it through his affiliate link. Um, and from that he gets, yeah, tons of people. And,

Um, in this, in these days of training, you know, five, day four, five, six, whatever he has other things he recommends. Like he recommends an email autoresponder system he recommends. So as an affiliate, he, he promotes different things that he's, uh, other companies. That's how he's making his money.

And what's cool is that affiliate programs like ours, like ClickFunnels, we have a two-tier affiliate program. So what Anthony does is if you sign with and partner with Anthony, you can basically take his system, you can promote it as an affiliate, right? And then you get the $7 a month as an affiliate. And then when someone signs up for ClickFunnels, you get the commissions and Anthony gets second-tier commissions. Does that make sense? The way he's programmed the software.

And so this, for him, became very, very viral. And a member of Anthony told us on the thing, he's like, I've got 100 different products, but I only promote one on paid ads. And what I do on paid ads is this. People buy this, and then this training is free training. People love me. They're going through it. They love it. And from there, I'm recommending ClickFunnels. I'm recommending they buy this product. And all the revenue comes from him promoting other products. Sometimes he'll recommend his own product in here, but he never...

He never physically buys ads from any of his other products. He doesn't drive emails for any of his other products. The only thing he promotes is partner with Anthony and then the training does all the selling of everything else he's doing.

And so what's interesting is like when someone's paying for a membership site through learning, um, like their guards down, they're not like, Oh, I mean, this is a salesman. I'm on a webinar. He's going to pitch me something. I'm on a five day challenge. Someday they're going to be, he's going to pitch me something. It's like, no, this is a free training course. I'm not selling anything, but here's the tool you need for this. Here's the tool you need for this. Oh, if you want my templates for this and like the training just recommends resources. And, um, like I said, Anthony, uh,

Anthony's brilliant. He's probably one of the richest dudes I know in this market because he does really smart things like this that he doesn't do this customer support or anything. He just drives traffic one thing and it does all the work. So, so he shared that. And again, if you go back, if you guys log in the inner circle members area, that presentation is in there. If you listen to the inner circle members only podcast, it's also in there. That's where I listen to it all the time. Cause I go back to the old inner circle podcast. I listened to that and a couple other ones that are really, really good. He's getting this. Okay. Any questions about it all?

You have a question? Do we have a microphone I can throw at her? Oh, here. Trust me, I'll hand it over. Boom. Don't hit your camera.

Yeah. So affiliates is one thing I feel like I've never done. I understand the concept. But I always think of like I'm building out a startup in this program. And I want to make sure the product is solid before I launch it to affiliates. I noticed with like Secrets of Success, you launched affiliates like right out of the gate. And so it like challenged my thinking. But like when's the time when you like start to –

Create an affiliate program and you feel like it's the right time. So me personally, I think it's the first step. I've heard you say that. I'm asking this question. Because paid ads are the worst because paid ads is like, anyway, I'd rather get, because I was thinking about this, like the best traffic in the world is your own hot market, right? Your own list who loves you. Second best are that people may not know you, but they, you have a partnership with somebody who does know you and their audience doesn't, and they can recommend some warm referral. Like, Hey,

me, I created this really cool thing. You should go check it out. Like that's the second best. And then we go to the next phase, which is like, now we're going out to the masses. We don't know who we are. And that's colder traffic. That's paid ads. And so a lot of you guys are going straight to paid ads, which paid ads are harder because you got to get the copies. It's, it's harder to get copy to convert on ads and like all those kinds of things. Right. Versus like if I throw up, I can throw up a page tomorrow. That's like, Hey, this is Russell. You guys don't buy this thing. And I click down below and like,

And if I send it to all of you guys, most of you guys will buy it just because it's like we have an audience, right? But if I ran the same thing on Facebook ads, like John would start running ads in 30 seconds. Like no one will buy this thing. No one's converting. You know what I mean? But we're always trying – like everyone's trying to launch with the hardest thing possible. Where I'm like there's a huge pile of cash right here. And what you guys are all doing is like there's a pile of cash. I'm going to step over here. I'm going to step over here. I'm going to come over here. And like we're going to get this thing to work first and then we'll grab that. And you're trying to get the scale and everything. I'm like wouldn't it have been easier just to like –

grab this pile of cash and like put it in the bank. And then like, there's over here, get partners of cash and grab all that. And you spend a year doing that. Then you take this money now and you come over and now you start running ads over here with some profit. Like that's such an, in my mind, just easier. We did two years of click funnels of just grabbing all this before we had anyone before John, uh,

We were sitting in a meeting like, we should probably run ads someday. Who wants to learn? John's like, I'll learn. And that was like two years in the business before we ever ran an ad. But we'd already collected $10, $15, $20 million in profit before we started giving it away, which we need that profit. Growing a company when you're focused 100% on paid ads is hard because the profit's all getting sucked out by Zuckerberg or whoever.

Versus this is like you're keeping so much more revenue up front before you... Anyway, that's my belief. So you test the product. Like for you, now you have an audience that knows, likes, and trusts you. And it's all the same vertical. ClickFunnels, Zoomly, or whatever. All those are kind of the same market. Yeah.

And so it's like they're going to trust you in those same verticals. And so like if you have a product that maybe you haven't tested before, like that's my... Like info product or software product or what's... It's info, but I'm putting like e-commerce tied to it. Does it work? I mean, it's principles I've learned the last 20 years bottled up. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I've tested it in micro doses, right? So now I'm launching it. But still, I feel like there's things to test. Because affiliates, you have to build these relationships and you have to answer all these objections and things. Do you just bottle all that up before you launch it? My experience is most affiliates...

Oh, sorry. I didn't tell the end of the story. This might answer part of the question, but I told you, like, I did the webinar, draw a list, and I had the stats. This person's list has stats. So when I do an affiliate, they don't know who I am most of the time. I'm like, hey, we've run this webinar 12 times. Here's everyone's stats. And you say, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And they're like, oh, cool, I'm in. Like, most affiliates are doing it because they're trying to figure out how to make it. They want, obviously, good product and stuff like that, but they're more...

Like they want a webinar to converge or they want an offer that converges. Like that's more important typically. So are they doing their own webinars? I'm like, this is like new, the new space that I want to get into. And so I'm going to jump through all my false beliefs, but like you're doing the webinar, they're just setting up the audience. So they're taking your web. Okay. They're just sending them to your webinar. Yeah. Well, I do, I do one specifically for them. Okay. Let's say, let's say,

I was doing one, like we set up a webinar. It's like the picture of me and your face on it. And you're like, Hey, my friend, Russell, that's really cool thing. We're going to do a webinar. We're going to talk about it. And they all jump on. Then you introduce like, Hey, um, all right. So, uh, Russell showed me this really cool thing to do. It's awesome. And I asked him if you're coming today, show you guys behind the scenes, how it works, check this out. And then you kick it to me. And then I go and do my full perfect webinar and I, and I sell it. Okay. Yeah. And then they get all the, and then they get the commission. Yeah. Okay. I'm willing to switch my thought. Yeah, but that's the way we've, we've done it. And again, I think it's,

I don't know, starting directly with paid ads. It's like, we've been doing secret success. Like we ran, we launched secret success. We put our list, the affiliates promoted it. We collected a million dollars for like two days and it's like second million dollars. We took that money to run the ads. And like, we've been running ads and we spent way too much money. We still can get ads to work. And I'm like, man, if I were to start with ads, I'm like, this business is dead. I would have given up. We've already collected $2 million from not ads.

And now we've got, we've got some breathing room to figure out how to get paid ads to work versus if I started there, we'd still be sitting around with no members. You know, ads are way harder than just your own list and affiliates because affiliates are implied endorsement, right? They're coming from somebody else. Always converts higher. Yeah. You can be worse and make more money, which is great. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Thanks. All right. Back here. Now we're getting some questions coming in.

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What do you do when your audience are not marketers? Our niche is, our audience is mostly Catholic moms. And so there's lots of influencers or people who have lots of wonderful content about faith and family. But we have limited success with them when they're trying to sell something to their audience who isn't used to being sold to. And they also are really inexperienced marketers.

with marketing and you know any any of this in our world we shared a little bit with them and the stuff that we learned at FHL about the sort of sequence of stories and things we've had a limited success with it but I would love affiliate marketing to work because I just love relationships over Zuckerberg but we just cannot get it to scale you're saying it doesn't work when your customers are being affiliates or when your partners that have audiences are trying to

Yeah. When our partners, when our other like influencers. Okay. What are those influencers selling? Are they selling anything? Nope. They're just influencers who just influence for fun. Yep. That's so crazy, huh? How do they make their money? They don't, they don't. They just love hanging out on social media and building community and showing cute pictures of their kids and talking about, you know, what they're passionate about. So is the question or is the problem that they can't

Um, they can't promote correctly or their people don't buy both. Which one's a bigger problem? Um, I mean their people buy because their people, people are also our customers and don't have any problem buying. The hard thing is getting them to promote. Yeah. Okay. And then in the past, how have you compensated them?

Percentage of sales. Okay. Free product. Okay. So for most of, so my experience, and this is like, Alison Prince would be able to speak this way better than me, but like with a lot of times that type of influencer, a lot of them, especially if they don't know affiliate marketing, the percentages are confusing them and they don't understand it. So they don't, they don't, um,

They don't know how to push out of like 30% doesn't make sense in their head. And so we've done a lot of times in the past as we shifted around, we're paying a CPL or CP, you know, CPL CP, you know, so Zuckerberg, you're gonna spend what, how much per lead would you spend on Facebook for, um, for an opt-in for a webinar? Let's say,

Well, for our product, our average order value is about $50, and so we try to keep it around $20, $25. Are you selling through a webinar? How do you sell? Straight VSL or what? Nope. Just to Shopify. Okay, Shopify. Do you have an opt-in? If the affiliate's promoted, you have an affiliate push to Shopify? You're having to promote anything? Shopify, yeah. Okay. So what I would do is I would try to figure out what's a way that you can make it really, really...

easier for the affiliate. So for example, I might do is like, they say you do an event with a co-branded event. It could be just a fun, like whatever, have them promote that and say, I'm going to pay you $1 for every single lead that registers for our thing. Cause then now it's not like 30% of, I don't know if this makes any sense to me. No one's going to buy whatever. It's just like, I'll pay you a dollar per lead, which is,

I guess if you were to pay Zuckerberg for a statement, you're paying $3 to $5 for leads. Now you're a third of the cost or whatever. And they're freaking out because like, wait, I guess somebody could put their email address and give me a dollar every single time. And now it's something they can tangibly do. Like if I send a thousand people or 10,000 people, like the numbers now make sense in their head really easily. Okay. And then it's very simple. And then you do something like that. You jump on it. You can even just like, you guys are in a Facebook live hangout. They introduce you. You talk about a thing. Then you push to the Shopify store and you keep 100% of profits. That way they don't have any risk or anything in there. They're getting paid up front. Now it's just,

Now in their head it makes more sense. So whenever I've done affiliates who aren't traditional affiliates who don't understand it, I usually come back and try to pay them CPL. If I pay you cost per lead or sometimes it's cost per click. Every click you send, I'll pay you 50 cents. They're like, what? This is amazing. And I'm like, I paid Zuckerberg $3 per click. This is insane. It's a whole different world. In fact, some of you guys may know Eric Beers in the Atlas program, but he's a traffic broker. That's all he does. And so he goes to these big places.

And he finds people with huge lists, huge databases, stuff they don't understand our world at all. And so he'll pay like five cents a click. And then he sells them to us for like 25 cents a click. And he's making five X's money. And then I'm like, I'd normally pay a dollar for this click. And it's like just arbitrage the whole way through. And so you're going to the level where you can get people for insanely cheap because they don't understand the value of their traffic. And so just looking at how to structure for that affiliate where it's just like a no brainer for them.

You know? Yeah. That's the funny about affiliate marketing is just, is you figure out, cause I found there's like different tiers of affiliates. Like some affiliates are,

All they care about is just money. They're just money obsessed, don't care what the product is. And those ones are the easiest to deal with because they just want money. As long as you offer converts, they'll promote it. The next one are people more like me who are obsessed. I want an amazing customer experience that it's going to be, as long as the customer experience is the best in the world, that's what they care about. They don't care how much money they make or whatever. They just want to make sure it's going to serve their customers. That's number two. And then the third are just people that don't know what they're doing. And so it's like you just work with them and figure out what it is you're looking for. And you craft it and create it. And then boom, you can do some really cool things.

Yeah, awesome. Thank you. Yeah, no worries. You're talking about affiliates and then the delay and click fraud and things like that. Do you have any bridge in the gap between that and affiliates for services? So you're obviously familiar with what we do.

I've never entertained affiliates or taken a shot at it because of that risk, because our service is delayed or it's higher ticket, things like that. Do you have any experience or recommendations for potential how I could roll out an affiliate on an agency side? Yeah. So one of the easy things I've seen people do in your situation is there's different ways affiliates get paid, right? Like I'm paying out an hour, it's 100% front-end commission. Some people pay out recurring where it's like you're getting 40% of the recurring thing. The other one is you pay an upfront CPA. So for example...

Shopify right now will pay an affiliate like $200, $250 when you get someone signed up for a free trial. Now you get none of the money afterwards, but just the money up front for setting it up. So what you could do is create something where it's like a $300 onboarding something and you pay affiliates 100% of that. And then there's the risk is that, but then afterwards you're onboarding a client and then you own the person moving forward for the rest of it. Does that make sense? So like, again, yeah.

Anthony Morrison, I was talking to his brother, Adrian Morrison, he's Shopify's number one affiliate right now. So they actually pay him, I think, $350 for every free trial he signs up, but he gets nothing afterwards, just that. So he's able to spend $200, $300 to get a lead and he's just

just blow he's Shopify's number one affiliate right now so same thing is like how do you create something on the front end that doesn't cost you a lot of money that you could pay so they get the big up front even though they know like hey they're going to sign a $10,000 a month contract for next year the affiliate wouldn't get any of that because that's when it gets hard because you have your hard costs and all the other things I would try to create something on the front end that brings somebody in that then 100% or 50% whatever that is you could pay out an affiliate on that and that's how I would shift it does that make sense yep

Oh, so the light's shining. I can barely see it. And then, okay, cool. Yeah. That's how I structure my day. Even if it's like,

Yeah, some kind of front end, like we do a keyword research and consulting and figure out something like that that's upfront work, like paying out a lot more on that and nothing on the continuity side. Cool, thanks. I have another question. So we start an affiliate program and we do pay them per click, per lead, and then if there's a conversion.

the problem we have is retention. Like, they would send out a promotion and then stop.

And so how do we get them to continually promote our product? Yeah. Yeah. Affiliates by default, especially good affiliates are lazy. So that's, we've noticed like I have to, like if someone agrees to promote something, it's, that's like step one, but it doesn't mean they're actually doing anything. So for us, it's like we write the ads for them, write the copy, we do the stuff and then we have to give them reasons to promote. So that's why I've shown you as yesterday when I was showing all the mini, like for secret success, all the little mini dramatic demonstrations during every single month.

It's because the affiliate is promoted once. They don't want to promote the same thing again. So I have to give them a reason to promote. So I'm like, hey, this month we're doing this cool Earl Nightingale campaign. Do you want to promote that? And they're like, oh, that's unique. That's different. Yes. Even though it's selling the same product, but it's different campaigns and different things like that. And then honestly, you have to have an affiliate manager who's in contact. Like we've got multiple people who run our affiliate program on our team who are like, they're talking to affiliates all the time. What's working? What are you doing right now? Like, what are you looking for? And like, do you have a promotional schedule? Like, can you send an email out? Can we do a social media blast? Like, can we put a...

a link in the PS of your emails, but they're, they're in constant communication with our top affiliates trying to figure out how we can weave into what they're already doing because they're, yeah, affiliates are,

and I'm a really good affiliate, like we're all nightmares. Like we're the hardest people to work with just because we can make a lot of money. We know that. So it's coming back and understand like we got to help them and figure out how to different ways to integrate. Um, that's why I think having a, uh, an affiliate manager who's full time working with affiliates is like an essential role if you really want to do this well because they got to be constantly communicating with them, showing the new offer. So this is where our affiliate manager will focus most of the effort on those who are in here and in my job as the, as the funnel, but you know, as the person is, I got to keep coming up with new offers.

So I'm going to come out with a new secret success offer. And then all the affiliate managers will hit everyone. Hey, there's a new offer, secret success. Everyone go run it. And then I'll do the next one. It'll come out. And then the next one, we're putting out new offers to give them new things to promote and to go out there. If you're like an actual affiliate, like in an affiliate network, you sign up for an affiliate network, which basically is a whole bunch of, you know, tons of different offers. What typically happens, you'll be connected with an affiliate manager and they're hitting you up a couple of times a day. Like, hey, there's a new offer from this company. You want to try it? Here's an offer from here. And like, they're hitting you up trying to figure out what offers you want to promote, but it's a constant communication with your top affiliates.

So you're saying have different type of offer or just a spin on the same offer? Both. Yes and yes. It's like all the dot-com secrets book funnel and the traffic secrets book funnel and this. But I also have like dramatic demonstration about this part of the thing. So we're giving different offers, different webinars. Like we're just putting out different front-end things to get them engaged, get them excited about whatever we're promoting. Thank you. Yeah.

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Yep. So, uh, if you were to start over as an affiliate, what would you do to do secrets of success as an affiliate of your own company? How would I be? How would I promote as an affiliate? Yeah. Um,

we get a whole three-day event on that that'd be really fun yeah i know i mean the reality is i would try to build a list a segmented list based on the topic so i take my existing audience i'd be like hey i'm doing this cool thing over here if you're interested opt in and i would segment everybody to like here's people interested in this topic and then i would create bonuses to get people so as an affiliate the way and you don't see me promote things like when i promote something as an affiliate my usually thing it's like hey

this is the offer that they're going to give you, but I'm going to throw in at least three bonuses for me. I create a better offer. That's how I usually win most affiliate competitions is by just figuring out how can I make this offer even more sexy? What bonuses can I create? What training? What kind of things can I put together? And I have a sub list and I just keep sending them stuff based on that. So I remember that in 2015 you did a contest with Ferrari that Jeff Walker won. Yeah. What do you think about those contests? Are you thinking doing...

Pros and cons. Yeah. So, so, um, I think I'll just show you, I wish we could show you guys, we should let you have an extra affiliate launch. Like let you guys in here and see how we do it. So there's two ways to look at me running an affiliate program. Number one is I like doing launches because launches, first off, you get a lot of cash coming in, a lot of traffic and it's, it's fun to get people behind something, right? So for example, in May, Justin Benton and I are working on the Think and Grow Rich Challenge. So this is a challenge that's coming up. So we have a whole bunch of affiliates and, um,

We want to create a fun competition amongst affiliates because that gets everyone promoting harder, right? And so we set a date. This is what's happening. And so we have a whole launch calendar with everyone, and we start contacting affiliates. They come in, and then there's a beginning of a launch. There's an end of a launch. We always give away prizes and things like that. Usually there's like the top 10 get prizes. The top three get a better prize. We make a whole bunch of prizes. That helps a lot.

doing a launch like that. It's also a lot of work though. And you spend, you're spending a lot of money on prizes and things like that, but they, it works really well. So there's that side of it. And then there's also like, like a rolling launch where I have a really good offer. And like, for example, launch click funnels. Like, um, I didn't just do one webinar for everyone. It was done. I did a webinar to your list and then to your list. And so I was like a rolling launch going for a year. I was just rolling week after week, week after week to hit more and more people. So

The question a lot of times is like, which one's better? And for me, it's like, they're both amazing, right? Like I do the big launch because the big payday, but then launch is over. And I was like, cool. Now we're moved to rolling launch and let's get a person and another person. And like, we're just rolling through as many people to keep, keep traffic and sales coming in. Cool. That makes sense. But yeah, affiliate prizes are great. Um, one really cool thing about affiliate prizes, like typically if you look at, um, when we're in affiliate launch, the top 10, we almost always include some type of mastermind and there's a reason here's the strategic evil reason behind it.

Because what happens is like, we do the launch, they win the mastermind trip, and then we time the mastermind trip a little bit before the next launch is gonna happen. So what happens is they all come out, we hang out with them, we do a mastermind, we serve them food, we have a good time, everything's amazing. And then at the affiliate mastermind launch, like, hey, just so you guys know, the next launch is happening next month. Here's what it is. Now our top 10 affiliates all are there in one spot. We recommit them to the next launch and they enroll at the next launch. And so that's a big piece of the strategy. So for our secrets to success, we do the affiliate launch.

We did the affiliate launch and then the prize was we took everyone to Chicago to the Nightingale Conant offices and we did a full one-day event there. And at the event, we said, hey, the next launch is Think and Grow Rich Challenge. It's coming up in two months from now. We committed them, got them all scheduled out, and so hopefully those people all promote again. And then for them, the next prize is we're going to Wise, Virginia, Napoleon Hill's house for the next prize. They want to win that. It helps push people from thing to thing to thing. Okay, cool. Back here. It's so interesting to me, real quick, before you jumped in, like,

15 years ago, when you go to a marketing event, all we talked about was JVs. It's funny because like...

It's like everyone talks about ads and it's like, this is for a lot of you guys, this is so foreign. It's funny to me because it's like, man, back in the day, this is the only thing we talked about. No one talked about ads or pay-per-click. It was just fascinating. Anyway, sorry. No, you're good. So I was curious, do you think that this works if your dream client is somebody who wouldn't have a list, isn't on the entrepreneur side or anything? So everybody that we go after is a W-2 who just has their inner circle. Is it worth trying to set up an affiliate program if we don't really have anybody that works?

that would know what a list even it's like if you pull out the entrepreneur side. For sure. So a couple of things is, is your customers. So we look at this two ways. Like there's customers who love what you do and they're usually going to bring in one or two. Like they're not going to, they're not gonna be big affiliates. Like that's what the training size, but it can, they may only pick up one or two sales. Like it's not a huge deal, but if we bring a lot of our customers in there, they love our stuff and they can refer other people. Like the volume becomes big. The bigger side of the affiliate program is, is going on actually attracting people who are affiliates. Like,

like for sure that's the bigger thing right so like the fit evolution offer is interesting because it's twofold it's number one so we're trained beginners to give them a platform help them train them up but number two it's like we're gonna use this to go out to all the big affiliates like hey

You've promoted our stuff in the past. You want 100% commission? Cool. Join the site right now. Upgrade to 100% commission and then we get them to promote. So when I look at affiliate program, I'm less looking at like banking on my existing customers being the ones who are going to drive a lot of volume because they're usually not. Instead, I'm like, who are the other people in my industry? Like looking back at Dream 100, right? Who are the people who already have my dream customers on a list? Like that's what I'm focusing my affiliate program on initially because again, you get one or two of those to promote something that's worth

100 customers who are doing onesie twosie sales. You know what I mean? So if you're looking at where to focus the most effort, it's definitely on who are the influencers in your space that you could focus on catering and building out a really good affiliate program for. Awesome. Thank you. Yep. No worries. Okay. Is that all it? All right. Oh, no. We got one more. Okay. When we finish with a customer, we deliver, they're happy with our service product. If we were to bring them on to you, where do you think would be the best place

place where to introduce them to youth, to help them develop that entrepreneurial side of things.

What do you think to, Hey, you should be purchasing these books. Where would be the most seamless? So for everyone he is, it's gonna be different based on what your front end business is, which is why I needed affiliate manager. So I do is I had Ben Harris talk to him. Like he asked, what's your, what's your business? How does it work? Where's someone at? And then from there it's like, okay, based on this, like for you, a book would be the best thing. Like, so how have you set up a campaign for the book? But it might be like, the book might not be right for your audience. Maybe it's the webinars. Like, Oh, let's do a webinar.

Or a lot of times for our team, it's like if someone's got a big enough list, it's like, hey, let's do a collab webinar. Russell actually will bring Russell on live or we'll bring on one of our webinar presenters on live. We'll create a whole webinar for you where it's co-branded. And then you can come and be like, hey, I'm doing this cool webinar with ClickFunnels. And it's a co-branded thing now. And so it just kind of depends. It's very much...

That's why it's good to have an affiliate manager who's kind of trying to put together these deals with people because, again, every affiliate is going to be a little bit different. Again, some affiliates just want cash. Some want a really good experience. Some are looking for stuff. It's all a personal thing. I just want to share that this works. Like six years ago, we were giving $100,000 a month to Zuckerberg and Google combined.

And fast forward now, 95% of our business comes from affiliate partners. And just exactly what he was saying, there's those that are just going to send two or three deals in. They'll just use your automated funnel. But when you have a big player that has a big list, that's where you do that custom webinar.

And you do it together with them. Maybe you record it and they put it in their email autoresponder for some of their new clients. And that way you're getting clients in continuously. But that custom webinar, we do that all the time with big partners. And that brings in monster business. Yeah, it's huge. Have you guys read the book Integration Marketing by Mark Joyner?

If you haven't, it's like an hour long read. It's really short, but it's, it's fascinating. So integration marketing is, is like, how do you, cause like, again, if I get affiliate, if I come to, uh, to Dave Lindemann, I'm like, Hey man, we promote my thing. He's like, yes, this is amazing. So we do a promotion. He promotes that. We get a bunch of sales and then it's over and then it's done. Right? So integration marketing is really interesting. It's like finding partners and yes, you want to do the one time sale, but it's like, how do I integrate my business into his business so that, um, so that even if,

Like after the promotion is done, like it's not over. Right? So for example, if I was to come back today, I'd be like, Hey, let's do a webinar together. It's gonna be amazing. So we do a webinar together, right? Whatever happens, it converts well. And then we record the whole thing. I said, okay, I'm going to build an evergreen funnel out of the webinar we did together. So I built an evergreen funnel for him. I'm like, Hey, let's go back to your email sequence. And like, where can we plug this into your email sequence? He's like, well, I have a 12 day email sequence. Like cool. Day 13 through 15, we do three emails. Let's put those in there. All pushing this webinar. And that way the webinar we did once you'll get paid forever. And then I'm like, Hey, what else could we do? He's like, well,

Um, you know, in social media, I've got this or I've got, you know, whatever it is. And I'm like, how do we integrate in? How do I put it? So that on your thank you page, if somebody opts into your, your list, I can put a link on the thank you page that pushes now to the webinar we did together. So go back to his offers and plug it in there. And like now all your customers, when they buy a product, you take them to membership site. How do I put like this offer to the member? And so we try to integrate into that person's sales process.

everywhere we can do. And so for me, when we launched ClickFunnels, Mark Joyner was my first mentor. He had just written integration marketing. So I was like, how do we start doing this? And so for the last decade, I've been doing this process with our affiliates. Like due to a promotion, then we'll come back and try to weave things into their sequences, their autoresponders, things like that. And we get...

so much traffic. Again, I told you, more than 50% of our traffic comes from affiliates and these are not people doing active affiliate promotions most of the time. Usually it's like we set up all these deals five years ago and every time they get an opt-in in their funnel, email 13, they're hitting us click funnels. And most times they forget it's even in the sequence and we just keep getting traffic as their companies grow. So that's the other powerful thing about affiliate marketing. We start looking at it through that lens. It's just like every single...

If I can integrate into that person's business, like as their business grows, my business grows. Right. Um, anyway, so that's, that's really the power. I look at, again, our top five affiliates, none of these guys actually pro click funnels, but all of them have some kind of training system and we're plugged into everyone when their training systems were day three or day 10, they're telling the people they need, they need a funnel and then they give them a click funnel share funnel and word ones plugged in there. And so it's like these people, as their businesses grow, our business grows and it's just like the most beautiful thing in the world for how you can integrate into other people's businesses.

Does that help? Yes. Because then we do that. We spend, spend a year doing that. Spend three years doing that. And then you can cut off Zuckerberg. I'm done kind of paid as just retire and everyone else's business. They're growing. Your business grows on the back end because of it, which is awesome.

Do you have a question? Yes. I'd love your opinion on the places that aggregate a whole bunch of affiliates like click bank.com. Yes. Great question. Um, so I'm a big, again, this is gonna be different for everyone's market. Um, but affiliate networks are nice cause they've aggregated for it. So click bank.com, for example, if you go there, there's a whole marketplace with thousands of products and they have, they, um, uh,

And affiliates come and they can promote things. And so what I typically do and what we do all the time, but like if I'm going to a new business, I'll go to ClickBank and I'll go find the top 20, 30 offers. And I sign up for all their affiliate programs. And when you do that, you get on all their lists. And what's typically happening is most of these affiliate programs are doing affiliate launches. And so let's send out links like, Hey, we did our affiliate launch. Here's the top 10 affiliates. And boom, they show you here's the top 10 affiliates by name. And guess what you do?

You look up their name on Facebook. You become friends with them. You send them a present email. Also like the top 10 affiliates all like you can ask a lot of times, uh, people will come in. In fact, we had a guy who's secret success. He'd never promoted anything ever. He throw things like the top two or three affiliate. And he's like, man, I did that one affiliate promotion. He's like, it's so crazy. I felt like 50 people reach out to me to promote their offer. I'm like, yeah, it's because you're on the top 10 list. And so if there's affiliates happening in your, in your business, like join everyone's affiliate program, sign up for them and just start watching what they're doing. Cause it's

typically that's some version that's happening where they're talking about the top 10 affiliates and you start getting to know who the affiliates are. You know, their affiliate managers. Um, uh, it's all, again, it's just a relationship business. And so I try to get to know the affiliate managers in all the different programs, uh, because they have access to all of their dream affiliates. Right. Um, and a lot of times we've literally had it before where, um,

we'll ask the affiliate manager, like, man, you guys are awesome. Like we'll have a good conversation. I'm like, who are your guys top affiliates? And they'll literally like, here's a lot of top affiliates. And they just give us the info. I'm like, you just gave me your top affiliates. This is insane. Um, so there's a lot of things like that. Um, uh, in the, in the, like how to make money on the internet world. Um, obviously it's ClickBank. There's other ones. There's, there's a whole, there's a whole bunch of aggregates that have those kinds of things. Um, I'm not sure about other industries, if that's,

if that's as applicable, but if you can find it, um, it's a big part of it. Great question. Any other affiliate questions back here? Well, I agree. The question I have is like, you're talking about the integration marketing by that psychology. Like how much, is there any special thinking that you do within a, uh, uh, affiliate contest launch? Like,

Like, for example, I'm thinking of Bridger and Mason's gamification for their events and stuff like that to sell tickets. Are you doing anything like that with how you promote your...

launches with like the, the rewards inside of what comes in the contest. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Um, if you look on the back end, there's some people that are better than others. Like again, I'm signed to everyone's affiliate launch. I'm always watching it. Um, the ones that can, they can do the gamification is big deal where they're always doing prizes. Like there's a weekend prize. There's a Thursday where it gets the most sales today, where we get the most opt-ins today. Like you'll get Dean. Dean does a great job of this when all Dean and Tony launches where it's like,

all right, this weekend we're doing a leads contest. Whoever gets the most leads, we're sending you an iPad. Whoever gets the most leads, you're going to get this. And so everyone's fighting for leads. And the next day it's like, there's another thing and like, and they're competing. And then every day it's like talking trash, being number two and number three and number one. And like, it's this whole like trash talking game and it's, it's competitive and it's fun. And like the best,

The best launches have a lot of those kind of things, a lot of gamification amongst the affiliates in there. And again, that's why you should join everyone's affiliate launches. How many of you guys are affiliates of Dean and Tony's? Okay, how many of you guys are affiliates of Stu McLaren?

Okay. Like both these programs are launching in the next like 30 days. Like go and join it, get in their Facebook group and just watch and just like, just look at the games that are happening behind the scenes. Cause, um, they're both really, really good at what they're doing. If you're like, I don't know how to get to Stu's affiliate program. I don't know. Go to go type in Stu McLaren, uh, product launch or whatever his name is. Course launch. And like, anytime you see the launch happening, people are promoting stuff like it's

search for the product name and like JV affiliate, go to the Facebook. You're using it as a Facebook group for almost every affiliate launch where all the affiliates are in there together. They're talking and hanging out and like just start looking for those things and start plugging yourself in because that's when you start. Um, that's where you'll see this happening. You'll see the games and you can model for what you're doing. Plus again, you can start stealing their affiliates and building relationships with the top people and that kind of stuff. So I mean meeting their top affiliates. Yeah. So,

Good questions. Okay. Any more before that? Two more things. And all right. I'll think about that. I'll think about putting together something. It's actually funny. Stu McLaren and I, man, almost probably close to 20 years ago. Now, when we first met, Stu was the affiliate manager for, for Dan Kennedy's business and

Armin Morins and Alex Mendoza. He was affiliate manager for all these guys. And I had my own affiliate program back then. I think I had 38,000 affiliates for my program way back 20 years ago. And so we came together and we did an event called Affiliate Inferno, which taught people how to run and launch their own affiliate program.

And it was like we did a three or four day event. It was really, really cool. But I haven't really talked about that kind of stuff for a long time. So I'll look at putting together something for you guys that could be more like a more complete thing to really help. Because I think, again, my whole goal in life is how do I –

All the things I can do right now to decrease my dependence on Mark Zuckerberg, the better. That's my number one goal right now. It's everything. This is such a big focus for what we're doing. All these other things we're doing just to focus more on affiliates, advertising networks, everything that's not related to those guys. I think for all of you guys, just protect yourselves for future. Understanding affiliate marketing and being able to build that part of your business is essential.

I don't know. I think it's detrimental. If you read the traffic secrets book, like the intro is like, if you read the intro, it's like, there's a storm coming. And like, I was talking about this, like right now when I'm writing this, Facebook's the greatest thing in the world. We all love it, but the storm's coming. I promise you like right now, like I feel like we're in that it's getting harder and harder and it's not going to get easier. Um, and so now is the time to really start focusing on these other alternative methods. Um, that are powerful.