Dan Martell - December 12, 2022


How to Build the Ultimate Affiliate Program


Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

197.1289

Word count

1,332

Sentence count

49


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about how you can build the most powerful SaaS affiliate program in the world and why you should be building one. If you don t know what an affiliate program is, then this episode is for you! In this episode you'll learn: 1. Paying your affiliates a solid payout 2. Bulletproof offer 3. Resource to win 4. Onboarding Training

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 I want to share with you four strategies to build the most powerful SaaS affiliate program ever.
00:00:06.060 You know, I learned this not only generating tens of millions of dollars in my own businesses
00:00:10.440 through affiliates and partners, but teaching this to 500 of my SaaS clients to do it in their
00:00:16.880 business themselves. For many of them, it's become a third of all the demand generation
00:00:22.100 in their business so that they could grow without spending money. Like literally the
00:00:27.580 The most beautiful thing about an affiliate program
00:00:30.000 is you can have somebody else wake up every day,
00:00:33.300 build the most creative marketing campaigns
00:00:36.240 and have people that you couldn't afford to hire,
00:00:39.380 executing these marketing strategies
00:00:41.340 to bring you new customers
00:00:43.080 and you only pay them once you get paid.
00:00:46.100 It is the most beautiful marketing strategy out there,
00:00:49.060 but I wanna teach you the four specific aspects of it
00:00:52.120 that's gonna make this next level
00:00:54.000 for you and your software business.
00:00:55.620 Let's get into it.
00:00:57.460 Number one is payout strategy.
00:00:59.800 When people are evaluating different affiliate programs,
00:01:02.560 they might be looking at you and your competitor
00:01:04.660 and trying to ask themselves like, who should I promote?
00:01:07.100 One of the coolest things that I learned
00:01:08.940 working with a guy named Clay Collins,
00:01:10.460 he built this payout strategy that was super aggressive,
00:01:13.820 30% lifetime value forever
00:01:17.020 for people that brought them customers.
00:01:18.600 And now when you think about it,
00:01:19.780 I want you to consider a few things.
00:01:21.740 Number one is the percent you pay out.
00:01:23.640 the average in the industry for SaaS is about 25%.
00:01:27.080 The other aspect is how long the pixel,
00:01:29.540 when you tag somebody or your affiliate tags somebody
00:01:32.160 as potentially being a customer,
00:01:33.820 there's the length that the pixel will stay active for.
00:01:37.240 Most people, the average is 90 days,
00:01:39.060 but you can go 120 if you wanna be super generous,
00:01:41.580 or you can go as little as 30 days
00:01:43.540 if you wanna bring that down
00:01:44.960 because you might be doing your own marketing.
00:01:46.780 But for me, the way to think about it
00:01:48.300 is to understand what can you afford, right?
00:01:50.760 What's the lifetime value of a customer?
00:01:52.940 Most SaaS businesses will pay out a third
00:01:55.400 of the lifetime value of a customer to acquire them
00:01:58.300 because they're gonna make up all their money
00:01:59.940 on the backend.
00:02:00.780 So be sure to think like Clay,
00:02:02.560 pay your affiliates an attractive scenario
00:02:06.180 so that they wanna promote you and stick with you
00:02:08.620 and keep promoting more and more people to your business.
00:02:11.440 Number two is a bulletproof offer.
00:02:13.420 So a lot of folks, they have an affiliate program
00:02:15.720 and it's only inside the product.
00:02:17.640 There's no affiliate page, there's no information about it.
00:02:20.260 But here's what I know,
00:02:21.380 is that if you want to attract great affiliates,
00:02:24.560 you got to treat it like a sales page.
00:02:26.320 You got to make sure that the headline, the copy,
00:02:28.540 the case studies, the proof,
00:02:30.300 the screenshots of how you've helped other affiliates
00:02:33.300 make money is all there.
00:02:34.620 You know, one of my buddies, Brennan,
00:02:36.480 he reached out to me once.
00:02:37.440 He was like, hey man, I'd love for you to be an affiliate
00:02:39.320 for our new products.
00:02:40.520 And I was like, that's cool.
00:02:42.040 Tell me how it works.
00:02:42.880 And he sent me a Google doc.
00:02:44.620 And what I loved about this Google doc
00:02:46.740 is not only did it have incredible copy, right?
00:02:50.140 not only did it have great examples, case studies,
00:02:54.000 but he literally gave me the math
00:02:56.140 to work out exactly how much money I'd make
00:02:59.040 basing on earnings per click.
00:03:01.620 He broke down all the different affiliates and programs
00:03:04.400 and average it out and said,
00:03:05.800 if you can send an email to your list
00:03:08.280 and you have this size of a list,
00:03:09.500 here's the kind of potential revenue you can make
00:03:11.980 based on the historical data that we have.
00:03:14.900 Giving me that information,
00:03:16.360 it made it so easy for me to say yes,
00:03:18.820 it wasn't like this i hope that i make money if i promote this he was taking all the risk off the
00:03:24.500 table putting it front and center and showing me what the results were for past affiliate partners
00:03:29.540 and allowed me to just feel confident that he had a bulletproof offer for me to want to endorse
00:03:35.300 number three is resource to win most affiliate programs do not support their affiliates when
00:03:42.420 When they sign up,
00:03:43.660 do you have a onboarding training sequence
00:03:47.180 to bring your affiliates to get them successful,
00:03:49.580 just like you do for your software?
00:03:51.440 Do you consider the things an affiliate would need
00:03:54.840 to be successful?
00:03:56.720 Landing page copy, ad copy, social media posts,
00:04:01.240 literally training on how to grow their own business
00:04:05.040 because if they can grow their business,
00:04:06.820 then they're gonna help you grow your business.
00:04:09.060 One of the things that I discovered a long time ago
00:04:11.160 when I built my Flowtown affiliate program,
00:04:13.260 Flowtown was a social marketing platform,
00:04:15.640 is I needed to treat these partners
00:04:18.400 like they were team members.
00:04:19.700 So that meant monthly calls.
00:04:21.540 It meant identifying things that certain affiliates
00:04:24.300 were doing that I wanted to share with the rest of them.
00:04:26.140 It meant training my affiliates to be better business people
00:04:30.260 so that they could grow their business.
00:04:32.280 Doing that process will blow away your affiliate results.
00:04:36.600 Number four is operationalize the channel.
00:04:39.100 One time I was talking to a coaching client
00:04:41.160 and we were just digging into their business
00:04:43.780 to try to understand where the growth died off
00:04:46.380 because they used to actually be a lot higher in revenue
00:04:48.440 and then it dropped.
00:04:49.260 So when they started working with me,
00:04:50.340 I just said, hey, show me your analytics.
00:04:52.380 And I saw this peak in their business
00:04:55.100 and then it dropped, their MRR dropped.
00:04:57.540 And I was like, interesting.
00:04:59.440 What did you do to cause that peak?
00:05:02.260 And he shared with me
00:05:03.280 that they were running a bunch of partner webinars.
00:05:06.440 And I said, why did you stop?
00:05:09.100 And he goes, we just started working on Facebook ads
00:05:11.960 and we forgot and I stopped doing webinars.
00:05:15.200 And this is the philosophy
00:05:16.940 that I always call growth stacking
00:05:18.640 is that when you have a channel
00:05:20.700 that's producing results for you,
00:05:22.740 you wanna operationalize it and stack it
00:05:25.480 and then put the new one on top.
00:05:27.500 But if you move to the next silver bullet syndrome,
00:05:30.760 you just stop something else to do the new thing,
00:05:32.940 you don't stack it, you don't operationalize it
00:05:35.820 and it just falls apart.
00:05:37.400 It literally is like a castle made of sand.
00:05:40.160 So what I want to encourage you,
00:05:41.440 if you have an affiliate program and it's starting to go
00:05:43.760 and it's a meaningful, ideally 25% of your demand,
00:05:47.680 you wanna staff it with a person that wakes up every day
00:05:50.680 to push it forward, to recruit more affiliates,
00:05:54.360 to ensure they've got the right resources,
00:05:56.300 to focus on the incentives to make it better, right?
00:06:00.800 You want somebody that wakes up every day
00:06:02.900 to push it forward, recruit more affiliates,
00:06:05.580 give them the resources they need
00:06:07.400 so that you can growth stack your business.
00:06:09.700 So if you want to build a world-class affiliate program
00:06:12.860 for your business,
00:06:13.480 you wanna make sure you build a great payout structure,
00:06:15.920 you wanna focus on the offer,
00:06:17.900 give the resources your partners need to win,
00:06:20.420 and most importantly, build an operationalized process
00:06:23.920 so that it doesn't fall apart
00:06:25.460 once you start doing something else in your marketing.
00:06:28.100 If you wanna learn more from me,
00:06:29.460 I have a strategic partner playbook training.
00:06:31.900 I'm gonna give you the training
00:06:32.880 where I walk through how to create your own partner network
00:06:36.040 to recruit them, to onboard them, to pay them out, et cetera.
00:06:38.820 Click the link below to get your access to that.
00:06:41.380 And as per usual, I wanna challenge you
00:06:42.680 to live a bigger life and a bigger business,
00:06:44.680 and I'll see you next Monday.