Teaching People to Make Money as an Affiliate with a Book featuring Matt McWilliams

Rob Kosberg:

Welcome, everybody. Rob Kosberg here. Got a great guest today, someone I think you’re going to learn a lot from, for our Publish, Promote, Profit podcast; a personal friend and somebody that I’ve learned from, and I’m looking forward to asking some more questions to learn even more about what he does. Matt McWilliams helps online business owners and brands, small and large, to leverage the power of partners to grow their businesses. He teaches how to make money as an affiliate and how to work better with affiliates, because you want to keep them. He’s been fortunate enough to spend the last decade plus, which you can see by the gray hairs on the side of his head if you’re watching this on video that he has been doing this for a long time, and he’s gotten to work with some amazing people, mutual friends of ours. He’s worked with companies like Shutterfly, Ray Edwards, Brian Tracy, Lewis Howes, many, many other people. I think you’re really going to learn a lot from this conversation. Matt, thanks for being on the podcast, buddy.

Matt McWilliams:

Thanks for having me, Rob.

Rob Kosberg:

Matt, just before we started recording, we were talking about a mutual friend of ours, Pedro Adao. You helped to manage the affiliates for his launch. He did some amazing things, Pedro, of course. In fact, I need to have Pedro on the podcast. I’m going to reach out to him about that. Pedro has become The Challenge Guy and has been teaching 1000s and tens of 1000s of people how to run a challenge model. You were really pivotal in helping his affiliates do amazing things. Talk through maybe some of the basics that people don’t understand about using affiliates to grow your business. Maybe we can even dive into some of the specifics and some of the cool things that you are now doing that you’ve done with Pedro and others.

Matt McWilliams:

I jokingly say affiliate marketing at its core has been around since the dawn of time. I have this visual picture. In fact, in my book, and I’m sure we’ll talk about that, there’s an image that we created that shows these three Romans sitting around in togas.  I just talk about explaining the technology behind affiliate marketing with cookies. That’s the tracking on it. We all know what cookies are now, because we’ve learned about cybersecurity. In the image, one Roman saying to the other, “So wait. If I make you sales, you give me cookies. Is that right?” The other says, “Yeah,” but the concept’s been around. One Roman introduced another Roman to a deli and the deli owner’s like, “Hey. Free sandwiches for you for a week.” That was his form of payment. Really, all we did, I don’t know, 25 years ago or so when affiliate marketing kind of came to be what it is today, we just added technology to it. That’s all we did. The basic concept builds on the basic structure of business 101, which is, it’s all about relationships. It’s all about referring people to products and services that will benefit them. So, if you are an affiliate, if you have a platform and there are gaps in your product offerings, you’d be the first to admit, Rob you’re the book guy. You know how to write a book, publish a book and market a book. How about building an email list? You’re not the leading expert in the world on this. What if I want to run a challenge to build my email list? Well, we just talked about Pedro. So, you’re going to refer them to Pedro Adao on the back end of your book. Are you the membership guy? No. That’s Stu McLaren. What about finding affiliates for your book? That’s not your thing. I’ve run a dozen affiliate launches with books for some awesome people. So, who are you going to send them to? You’re going to send them to Matt McWilliams and so on and so forth. So, for you as an affiliate, it’s your way of serving your audience by filling in those offerings, the gaps in your offerings. Then from the other side, it’s a way of simply getting more eyeballs on your products, your services, your lead magnets, your entry points and things like that. That applies to books as well. When I look back to the very first affiliate book launch I ran, I want to say it was back in 2015, and it was a Jeff Goins, The Art of Work, and he asked me for help. He said, “Well, how many books? I need to tell my publisher how many books I’m going to sell.” I said, “Tell them 15,000.” He was like, “I can’t tell them 15,000. My last book sold 3000, Matt.” I’m like, “You don’t understand what we do. Not just what we do and that we’re really good at it, but you don’t understand what happens when you have 100s and 100s of people all sending emails and social media messages at the same time about your book. It is a movement.” He’s like, “Okay. I’ll tell them 15,000.” We did 22,000 pre-orders. He had about 3000 at launch. Before, he did about 4,000 from his list. The other 18,000 were all from affiliates. That’s the power of having affiliates not only for a book, but for product launches. You can do challenges with affiliates like Pedro does. You can launch membership sites. I mean, you can launch a coaching program. We play this game called Stump The Affiliate Guy; name an industry that you can’t have an affiliate program and I said, “Anything with the government. That’s about it.” You cannot have an affiliate program if the government is involved. Outside of that, it’s anything.

Rob Kosberg:

The government is already our 50% affiliate. They take half of everything we do.

Matt McWilliams:

No comment there but the thing is, we’re talking it applies. It works for every price point. It works for every industry. I’ve worked with clients in the personal growth, internet marketing, finance, insurance, lead generation, parenting. The list goes on; health and fitness. All that.

Rob Kosberg:

Dude, I have to sit down. I’m already learning things. I didn’t know that. So, can I go down a couple of these rabbit holes here? So, I did not know about you doing Jeff Goin’s book launch. So, tell me how that works with a book launch because there really isn’t a lot to share. I mean, you’re talking about the price of a book versus a product that’s 1,500 or $2,000. So, walk me through what that looks like and what is incentivizing the affiliates to do what they need to do.

Matt McWilliams:

Yeah. So, the big thing is you got to have a backend offer. So, with Jeff, it wasn’t just, “Buy the book.” Like you said, the book’s 15 bucks. I think with that, we did a free plus shipping. You don’t have to do that. I think it was eight bucks for shipping and handling. You don’t have to do that. In order to actually get affiliates to promote your book launch, you have to have that backend offer that’s reasonably priced, so it’s going to convert, but it’s high enough that they’re going to make a decent commission. And so, with Jeff’s, we had two offers. We had the first offer the affiliates made money on. It was the audio book. We gave affiliates a 50% commission on that. And then from there, they got offered his $197 course, and they got a 50% commission on that as well. So, every book sale, we actually converted, if I’m not mistaken, it was either 18 or 22. It was 2% on one side or 20. One out of five people who purchased the book, the average order size was just over $100. That means that for every five books, they’re making 50 bucks because they’re getting a 50% commission. Every book was worth $10 in commissions. The cool thing about promoting a book as an affiliate is it’s a really low barrier to entry versus like, “Hey. Go buy this $2,000 course.” “No. We don’t know each other that well, dude.” It’s a really low barrier to entry that still makes commissions and you don’t have to send 100 emails to your list to be able to get them to promote. You have to have the back-door offer. Secondly, you want to drive traffic to an opt-in page. What you want is to drive them to a page where you’re collecting their email address first. This is as the book launch person. Then from there, they enter their information to either buy the book if they’re buying directly through you, or to enter their receipt number and things like that. The third, you got to pay a solid commission, I said before 50%, on those backend offers. It’s not the place be cheap. Lastly, we want to make our cookies long. What does that mean? Well, it’s called cookie length. What happens is, I refer somebody to your book and maybe all they buy is your book. Well, I don’t get a dime on that as the affiliate, but that cookie is set and if that cookie expires in 90 days, which is pretty common practice, and they buy your course, your $2,000 course a year from now, I don’t make anything. I’m probably never going to promote anything of yours again. So, if you make this a lifetime cookie, which means it lasts forever, all of a sudden, a year from now, you do a big product launch and I make $5,000. I’m like, “Oh, man. That’s awesome. Hey. When’s your next launch? What do you got coming up? Can I promote your next book?” It allows people to get involved, plus it’s a selling point in convincing people to promote your book. It’s like, “Hey. We’ve got a lifetime cookie.” So, you’re going to make money for years to come by sending a couple of emails about a $15 book.

Rob Kosberg:

I love it. That’s beautiful. So, when you talked about Jeff telling his publisher, “We’re going to move 15,000 books,” or whatever the number was, my immediate thought was the challenge here is that you must be sending them right to buy links rather than into a funnel. Now I completely understand. Basically, Jeff’s buying the books from his publisher and then using the funnel. We do the exact same thing with our free plus shipping, but I’ve never used affiliate traffic for my free plus shipping stuff, and I’ve probably moved 20,000 copies of my own Publish, Promote, Profit there via paid advertising. Wow. Affiliates could work fantastic for that.

Matt McWilliams:

Kary Oberbrunner actually conceptualized what will be my second book’s cover, because he said that no matter what you’re launching, whether it be a book, a product, a coaching practice, whatever, just think of affiliates as gasoline. You get 20,000. That’s amazing. As you know, less than 0.0000001% of all authors will ever move that many books.

Rob Kosberg:

Our average cart value’s 38 bucks. So, same thing. I have a $47 first upsell, 297 second upsell.

Matt McWilliams:

Yeah. You’re adding gasoline to that fire. You have the fire. You’ve done a great job. You bring on affiliates and it starts growing. The cool thing about affiliates that most people don’t understand is that it really is like a snowball. You go out and get affiliates for your first book and maybe you get 50 affiliates. Those 50, by promoting to audiences that you previously had no exposure to, will bring on between 25 and another 50, just because they did what they said they were going to do, which is promote you. So now you have, let’s say, 75 for the next one, and then those 75 will bring on between 40 and 75. Now you have 115. It grows exponentially with no extra effort from you, which is awesome.

Rob Kosberg:

I love it. I told you before when we were talking, I’ve done some affiliate stuff. You know I’ve been promoted for people and that’s gone very, very well. In the past, I had a couple of people promote for me and I see the incredible value of working with someone like yourself, because I got really turned off to the affiliate game a few years ago. I promoted for several people and promoted big for them and in exchange, they were going to promote for me and either A, several of them didn’t or B, they did, and it was like they had no list or they never really promoted me to their list. Even though it may cost me money not to do this, or even though I would rather just tell people one-on-one who to go to for certain, I know my audience’s needs aren’t necessarily getting met that way. It was such a bad taste in my mouth, dealing with people like that.

Rob Kosberg:

I can totally see, when you’re dealing with a professional like you, that a lot of that stuff gets avoided. Can you maybe speak to that a little bit? There are probably people listening that have tried it before, and it didn’t work out for them.

Matt McWilliams:

Your experience is not uncommon and it’s part of the broken system; the tit for tat. The good old boys’ network. Pardon the term, but it’s a very incestuous industry. About five to seven years ago, I started talking about this very openly. I was predicting the shift. In fact, I was responsible for the genesis of the shift back in 2015. We started the shift where we went away from that model to more of getting a lot of more small affiliates who weren’t doing it because they think Rob’s going to promote them. They’re doing it to some extent for the money, but they’re going to make 5, 10, 15, 20 sales. If we’re talking a book, they’re going to make 10 to 50 sales of a book on the high-end. These are not the people who send one email and sell 600 of your books. These are not the people that you go on one podcast to move 1000 books. That’s not who we’re talking about. We call them small affiliates, because they’re small affiliates. We predicted this shift and we were saying, “This is the future of the affiliate industry,” because of a few reasons. Number one, when you bring on these small affiliates, they don’t expect anything in return other than just a fair commission. They don’t expect you to promote them. It’s not that tit for tat, quid pro quo thing. Number two, it diversifies your affiliate base. Three, it’s usually your loyal students and people who know the product intimately. They have a story. I interviewed one of Pedro’s affiliates. They had 700 people on their list and made 12 sales; a $2,000 product, because they had a story. Well, what if they’d had 70,000 people, but didn’t have the story. You know how many sales they would have made? About 18. Well, a whole six more. Instead, you’ve got evangelists for your product. Here’s the other thing about the small affiliates; they grow. You take 100 small affiliates today. These are people who kind of feel like, “Why am I wasting my time on these people? They’re not even making any sales. They’re making two whole sales. That guy sold four books and I spent all this time nurturing that relationship. Why am I doing this to myself?” It’s because you take 100 small affiliates and you fast-forward three years and half of them will be about the same size, maybe twice as big, not that big of a deal, about 20 or 30 of them will be five to 10 times bigger, and then about five or 10 of them will just drop off the face of the Earth. They’ll get out of business, but you’ll have three to seven of them that will be 50, 100, 200 times bigger. They’ll get on Oprah. They’ll get a TED Talk that goes viral, something like that. You know who they remember? The person who gave them a chance, the person who paid them their first affiliate commission and the person who nurtured that relationship. I hear this all the time. It’s like our bread and butter. “You didn’t treat us like we were nobody. You treated us just like what I think you would treat a big affiliate like.” They remember that. That’s why if you look at our launches that we run with books, product launches, doesn’t matter, a lot of the people who were up there on these leaderboards now, are people who four years ago, five years ago, were nowhere to be found. I’m thinking of one guy in particular. In the most recent thing we ran, he made 162 sales of a $2,000 product. Two years ago, he made two sales of that same product. The number one affiliate in that launch. This is a five-and-a-half-million product launch, one of the biggest internet marketing launches in the entire year on the calendar; number one affiliate, 180-ish sales. She made over $200,000 in commissions and prizes. Last year, she made nine. The number three affiliate made about 150 sales. Last year, she made 75. That’s not as dramatic. All she did was double her sales. Four years ago, when she first promoted, she made two. That’s what happens when you work with these small affiliates as they grow, and they remain loyal to you and they promote you time and time again. And so that experience that you had, while it’s common, I think it’s the old way of doing things and there’s a much better way of doing it. It’s building up an army of people. It’s not the quid pro quo stuff. They’re just promoting you because they love you and they want to share you and your products with their audience.

Rob Kosberg:

I Iove it. When someone wants to do a book launch with you, or some type of affiliate launch with you, talk me through what your company does to manage that process for them. Give me the high-level bullet points of that.

Matt McWilliams:

Number one, we’re finding affiliates for them. We start with our network. We have over 5,000 people in our database that have promoted our clients in the past. Most of them have at least made a sale of a product that costs something. They might’ve promoted Jeff Goins and made a sale of his book six years ago. Well, they could be one of those people that’s 100 times bigger now. From there, we actually go and we look for people who’ve promoted similar books and products. There’s this website you’ve probably heard of it called Amazon. If you were releasing a book tomorrow, I start by going down the Amazon rabbit trail, and I find every book that I can that’s similar. Then we go find, “Okay. What were the podcasts that person was on? Who promoted him? Who posted on their blog about this book?” From there, we work with the client on identifying who are the people that they know. So, who have they had on their podcast? What podcasts have they been on? We help them reach out to them. From there, we bring the affiliates in. Our job from there is to motivate and engage those partners. It’s one thing for somebody to say, “Yeah. I’ll send an email about that book,” and it’s another thing to A, get them to actually send that one email, but then get to send them a second and a third and a fourth, and sometimes a fifth, to show them the value of, “Yes, you mailed two weeks before the launch date for the pre-order, but what if you hit up your unopeneds five days later and then again another five days and send one final email the morning of the last day of the pre-orders, the last day where you can get all these bonuses? Imagine the sales you can make, because nothing moves people like a deadline. We educate the affiliates. We teach them about the best practices; what’s going to work to actually move the needle. They then see the momentum and it kind of takes over for itself. When they start seeing those sales pouring in, next thing, they send six emails instead of one.

Rob Kosberg:

I love it. We’ve been going a little bit of time here and sharing really great stuff. What we didn’t say was that you are writing a book. Why does The Affiliate Guy with 5,000 relationships want a book? What’s the title of your upcoming book, and what’s the focus? Why are you doing that when you could just run a launch on any old product?

Matt McWilliams:

We end up talking a lot about affiliates in it, about getting affiliates and being an affiliate, but it’s not called, The Affiliate Effect, which will probably be my second book that Karey named. It’s called, The Passion to Profit Path, though we might be changing the title. We’re still working that out, but we’ll figure that out over the next three to four weeks. It’s all about taking people from this passion, this message, this idea that they have and turning it into a profitable business. We worked with clients and students, whether it was teaching them affiliate marketing, working with these six and seven and eight figure and sometimes nine figure businesses, we kept seeing businesses and business owners, almost exclusively the people we were working with fell into one of two extremes. We call them the two types of entrepreneurs. There’s the third type that this book is to try to get them to be. Type one is loving the fact that they’re making money. They’re making really good money. Their business is profitable. They might even be millionaires or 100,000-aires. They’re super happy with that side of their business, but they hate their work. They are just not passionate, and every day just becomes this mundane, money-driven mess. They’re tired. They’re exhausted, the complete opposite is, “Yeah. I’m waking up at 5:30 in the morning. I’m loving what I’m doing. I’m helping so many people. This is amazing. I cannot imagine doing anything else other than what I’m doing in life. I’m helping people. I’m having an impact on the world but I’m not making any money.” The thing is, it doesn’t matter if you’re making great money if you hate your work. That was entrepreneur type number one. It doesn’t matter if you love your work, but you’re not making any money or you’re actually losing money. Regardless of the extreme that you fall into, you end up giving up. You end up quitting. Eventually you have to just quit. You’re either going to burn out because you’re not making money or you’re going to burn out because you’re burnt out. Either way, the world misses out on these folks’ message. What we decided was, there is a better way. There’s entrepreneur type number three, which is like, “I’m building a business that I’m excited about, I’m passionate about. I wake up early in the morning. I go to bed late at night sometimes just because I forget that I’m even working. Oh, and also it’s making me some good money.” And when you have both of those, you get to keep doing it. I have every intention of doing what I’m doing until I don’t have breath anymore because I love what I’m doing and I’m making good money. It takes my story, and other stories, our client’s stories, our students’ stories, and weaves them all together in a way that shows a proven process, a 10-step process, to go from, “Okay. This is my passion. This is my idea. This is my message,” all the way down to step 10, which is about monetizing that message. It’s just a step-by-step, sequential path.

Rob Kosberg:

I love it. You’re obviously passionate about what you do. I love watching you do the thing that you do.

Matt McWilliams:

Thank you, man.

Rob Kosberg:

If you’re listening to this, then you want to get in touch with Matt as well as if you’re interested in using the affiliate gasoline to grow your business and grow your passion. Matt, thanks for being on. Tell us, where people can find information about your book or about your next upcoming launch. Where would you like to send us?

Matt McWilliams:

Yeah. I’m going to violate every rule. I’m literally going to violate the rule that I give in the book, which is give one call to action. If you want to check out the book and get a free sample chapter, I think you’ll like the sample chapter, because it’s all about consistently creating content, is step 10, just go to passiontoprofitpath.com, and you can grab that. If you want to find affiliates, like you were like, “You know what? I’m down with this, Matt. I’m ready to add some affiliates to my programs, my books, my book launch, whatever it is,” I’ll show you how to find your first 100. Just go to mattmcwilliams.com/first100. That’s F-I-R-S-T, 100. If you’re like, “I want to try to figure out this affiliate marketing thing, make a little extra money,” just grab my quick start guide at mattmcwilliams.com/quickstart. I’ll show you how to get started. Those last two are not the how do you build a seven-figure business. That’s how do you get some affiliates and make $50,000, how do you make your first $1000 in affiliate marketing. If you’re super advanced, shoot me an email. You can find it online. Shoot me an email. We need to talk.

Rob Kosberg:

Awesome. Thanks so much. Great job today. Thanks for being on the podcast. I really look forward to your upcoming book and seeing that explode.

Matt McWilliams:

Thanks, brother.