Dan Martell - December 12, 2022


How to Build the Ultimate Affiliate Program

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Clay Collins Brennan
Let's hear it! Why Your Hard Work is not Paying Off

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

197.13

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).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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.