How to Promote Your Membership Site with Affiliate Marketing In 2024
Are you looking for innovative ways to promote your membership site in 2024? Look no further! Our expert-led video dives deep into the power of affiliate marketing and how it can revolutionize your online business growth. From building partnerships to maximizing revenue streams, this guide has got you covered. Please take action now and watch our video for actionable insights on promoting your membership site with affiliate marketing. With special guest Matt McWilliams, the founder and presenter of the leading podcast in this space Affiliate-guy-daily-podcast.
#1 – Matt, can you give some insights into your background, how you got into the affiliate marketing world, and how you started your podcast?
#2 – What are some things you see people doing consistently wrong regarding affiliate marketing?
#3 – If you were advising a client who was new to affiliate marketing, what are some of the critical things that must be implemented for you to succeed?
#4 – What have been some of the biggest trends connected to affiliate marketing that you have noticed in the last couple of years?
#5 – How will AI change affiliate marketing in the next 18 months?
#6—If you had your time machine (H. G. Wells) and could travel back to the beginning of your career and business journey, what essential piece of advice would you give yourself?
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The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:00.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 83. In this episode, I’ve got a special guest. He’s managed to come in and agree to have a discussion. He’s one of the leading experts on affiliate marketing. He does the leading podcast on the subject, the Affiliate Guy Daily podcast. We’ve got Matt Williams in the house. It should be a great discussion. As I said, we will discuss all things around affiliate marketing and how you can utilize it in building your membership website in 2024. He’s the guy with the knowledge. It should be a great interview. So Matt, can you give The Tribe a quick intro about you and the podcast?
[00:01:09.370] – Matt McWilliams
Yeah, about my podcast. I mean, it’s a very simple podcast. I cover one thing and one thing only, and that is how to start, grow, and scale an affiliate program. That is it. So I share a lot of advice from my experience as an affiliate manager. I’ve been in the affiliate world for almost 20 years now as we’re recording this.
[00:01:28.020] – Jonathan Denwood
You look so young, though.
[00:01:29.960] – Matt McWilliams
I started young, but I’m like a dinosaur in the industry now. So, yeah, I mean, I started in the industry almost 20 years ago. My company that I had, myself and two business partners, were basically about ready to go bankrupt. We couldn’t make payroll the following week, and we were spending all of our money on marketing, traditional marketing back then, online marketing type stuff. We said, Okay, there’s a better way to do this. There’s got to be some better way where we can not only make money before we spend it, That’s a significant advantage, but also that is guaranteed profitable because we’re only going to share a percentage of the income. So the guaranteed profit is nice, but it actually can scale and can really grow our business in some powerful And so we had this random idea to start an affiliate program, and we did. Fast forward about 18 months later, that affiliate program was doing over a million dollars a month. And not only saved our business but put us in a position where we were able to hire an additional 35, to 40 people. We were able to become the largest privately held company in our industry and really set the course for the next 18 years of my life.
[00:02:40.230] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, there you go. That’s a fantastic story, tribe. As I said, it should be a great interview. Before we go into the meat and potatoes of the show, I’ve got a couple of quick messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I also want to point out that we’ve got a great new course. If you’re looking to build your membership website on WordPress, and I think you should do, but you’re looking to do it really quickly and painlessly, we’ve got a great course available to you that shows you from A to Z how to do it as quickly as possible and painlessly. It’s done by the other host of my podcast. He’s got enormous experience. Plus, we offer a special price to you, listener. You get a 50% discount, so it’s really affordable. To get this deal and to sign up for the course, plus a load of other resources. All you have to do is go over to wp-tonic. Com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals and you find the course plus a load of other special offers and deals from the sponsors. What more could you ask for?
[00:04:04.150] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s what I say. Go on, Matt. It’s not a bad joke, Matt. I’ll try to get a grin from Matt. There we go. You’ve had a hard day, I can tell. It’s only going to get worse because he agreed to come on this podcast. There we go. But I couldn’t help that. So Matt, given a fantastic intro, I can you’re a polished podcaster about how you got into affiliate marketing. So maybe… I don’t know if you want to go into any depth about it because you gave such a powerful intro message about affiliate marketing. So did you have any previous knowledge about affiliate marketing before you started it with this company, and it turned the situation generation around for you?
[00:05:01.560] – Matt McWilliams
Or was it just- Not really. No. I mean, in fact, that was the hardest thing was not only did I not know anything about it, but really nobody was talking about it. There wasn’t an Affiliate Guide podcast back then. I’ve published I’m on episode roughly 600, 580 something. I mean, that’s an average of 30 minutes. It’s 290 hours of content on affiliate marketing, building an affiliate program that you can I’ve written millions of words on my site at mattmclaims. Com. Literally millions of words. I think we’re over three or four million at this point, words. I may have written hundreds of articles, an average of a few thousand words each. I mean, that’s millions. It’s the amount of content, and I’m just one person. We have two courses on it with a third one coming, a book coming. There are another 75 to 85,000 words, all in something that’s this size. That’s a life’s work. In a book, it’s crazy. That didn’t exist back in five. And so when I was trying to figure out how to start an affiliate program, there were a couple of blog posts and a forum post that I could find.
[00:06:25.740] – Matt McWilliams
I’m not saying that I invented it, but I had to make it up for myself. Other people were doing it, not very many people, but other people were doing it. I didn’t have enough time to go out and learn. As I said, we could not make payroll in two weeks. We paid payroll on a Friday. This meeting happened on the next day, Saturday. The Saturday of in the United States, we have Memorial Day, Memorial Day Weekend, 2005. That is supposed to be a day where ostensibly, we’re celebrating those who’ve died in battle. But really, it’s just an excuse for Americans to take Monday off and go to cookouts and drink beer and have fun. I love it.
[00:07:03.960] – Jonathan Denwood
I actually live in America. I’m a joint citizen. I’m so English, aren’t I, Matt?
[00:07:12.300] – Matt McWilliams
And I’m supposed to be doing that. And instead, I spent the a weekend in the office trying to figure this out. In a matter of 72 hours, we coded. There was no out-of-the-box affiliate program back then. There are hundreds of options. We’re creating our own affiliate network. There’s dozens of good affiliate networks There are softwares out there that you can… I mean, you can have an affiliate program up and running by the end of today. You could be listening this at three o’clock in the afternoon, and by six, you could have an affiliate program. That’s how easy it is. We had to code it back then. So I had to get our developer, who, by the way, was seven times zones ahead of me, but thankfully was still up, and I didn’t have money to pay him. So I said, Hey, I’ll give you a percentage of all the sales to the affiliate program. Let’s just say he ended up making a lot of money. It was much better than if I paid them a few thousand dollars upfront to do it. And so we had to code this, and I had to figure out how to do it.
[00:08:05.910] – Matt McWilliams
And I came up with this philosophy. It’s still my philosophy today. If you look at the hard skills of running an affiliate program, there’s basically three. You need to know sales, you need to know marketing, and you need to know customer service. Now, there’s a lot of great salesmen out there who don’t know marketing. There’s a lot of great people who are customer service who don’t know sales or marketing. You got to know all three. Because you got to know how to market so you can communicate with the affiliates. I was a marketer. I knew SEO, I knew PPC. There was no social media back then, so I didn’t know that. But I knew the two big ones, PPC and SEO. I knew email marketing. I knew those. I had been in sales my whole life. I just didn’t know it up until about a year before. I grew up with a dad who was essentially a salesman. I knew customer service also from my dad and from other people in my life. I was able How to combine those three things and make it up as I went. Like I said, over the course of a couple of weeks, we were able to make just enough money to cover payroll.
[00:09:09.500] – Matt McWilliams
The next couple of weeks, we made just enough money to make payroll, and we did that for a few months. Then Again, fast forward 18 months later, and we were doing over a million dollars a month.
[00:09:20.400] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s an amazing story, really. You got all this experience. Normally, when you get a bit of experience under your belt, you start to see patterns. What are some of the most often things people get wrong around affiliate marketing or the things that they just don’t understand clearly? Maybe you can give one or two that you regularly see.
[00:09:52.980] – Matt McWilliams
The first one is that they don’t need an affiliate program. They think we can just grow. We can grow however we’re growing. We can grow our business only on Facebook ads. We can grow our business only on LinkedIn or only on SEO or only on what we’re doing. I often share this story, but there’s a guy There’s a story I tell about a guy who became a client whose name I… If you know our client list, you’ll figure out who it is, but I don’t say his name. I always call him Joe because this guy, he’s pretty famous. He’s delivered a main stage Ted Talk, not like TEDx, but main stage, has at least three, a few more than three best selling books. He’s a multimillionaire. He got me as a multimillionaire, and he was doing great. He said, We don’t need an affiliate program. We can grow our business on Facebook alone. They were doing millions of month, millions of month through Facebook. Now, the The irony is this guy, his entire platform is all about diversifying your income. In other words, having different income streams. You have your income that you earn and you should have investing, and you should invest in real estate.
[00:11:12.840] – Matt McWilliams
When you invest, you shouldn’t just invest in the Dow Jones or the S&P 500. You should invest overseas and you should invest in some small cap stocks, some risky stocks, and you should invest in real estate. He’s like, now even teaches, invest a little bit in Bitcoin, invest a little bit in gold. Which are very different than stocks. He’s investing bonds, investing all these things. He was putting all of his marketing eggs in the Facebook basket. After we talked, his CMO and I are really good friends. His CMO tried and tried and tried to convince him to start an affiliate program. He’s like, No, we don’t need it. Look at what we’re doing on Facebook. We’re doing five million a month on Facebook. Why would I start this other thing? They ran an ad. They got their account shut down for over a week. When they got their account, so one week, not a single lead came in other than a few referrals. Basically, their sales team sitting there throwing pencils up into the drop ceiling like, What the heck are we supposed to be doing? When it came back, their ad cost had more than tripled.
[00:12:13.760] – Matt McWilliams
They went from what amounted to pretty close to 100 % profit margin down to sub 10 % profit margin on their ads. And so then they called me, and of course, I charged them a lot more money than I would have.
[00:12:26.160] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s what you get. That was a very nice bet, was it?
[00:12:29.430] – Matt McWilliams
No, but they were desperate. They had to get this. We got this program up and running in five days, which is a lot longer than it normally takes. We got this program up and running. We scaled it. We scaled it rapidly. Ended up being huge for them. Now they’re doing $3, $4 million a month just from their affiliate program. They’re back up with Facebook, not to the original amounts. They were doing excess of $5 million a month through Facebook. They’re now doing about $3 million. But their total business, even with Facebook getting cut by 40% Their total business has almost doubled. So they believe that they don’t need an affiliate program. The other false conception that I see so often is just… Well, there’s two. There’s two, actually. The first one is that You have to know a lot of people, and you got to do a lot of reciprocal promotions to get affiliates. One of the underlying beliefs there is like, Well, the only way to get affiliates is if I promote you, you’ll promote me. We can’t just have affiliates who only promote us. That’s not true. Most of the programs we run, 99.9% of the affiliates, there is no reciprocation.
[00:13:37.280] – Matt McWilliams
They are promoting a good product. They are getting paid for it. That is the end of the transaction. The flip side is like, I got to I got to be famous to start an affiliate program. I got to know all the right people. I got to be best friends with all my affiliates. It’s just not true. When we ran, I’ve run Shutterfly, I’ve run Adidas, those programs, we had over 200,000 affiliates in each of those programs. I knew 50 of them. That meant I knew like 0.0001% of the affiliates. I didn’t even know who the other people were. I knew nothing about them personally. Now, those 50, yeah, I knew them really well. I could tell you their spouse’s name. I could tell you their kids names. I could tell you where they went to college, what teams they cheer for. But that’s about the limit, 50 to 125. Some of that information I would keep in a database so that if I did happen to get on the phone with one of the other 199,950 affiliates, that I could engage in conversation with them and be like, Oh, your team won the Super Bowl last week.
[00:14:36.780] – Matt McWilliams
Congratulations. I could do that. But then the other one is that people who believe that most of their sales are going to come from only a few affiliates. This is such a commonly held belief. I remember I was at a big conference, probably about six years ago, seven years ago. I was at a conference. Big name in the internet marketing space, Jonathan. We both know him. Everybody who’s listening this has probably heard of this guy. He’s become since then, a dear friend of mine and a client, and I’ve worked with him. But he said on stage, he said, 90% of your sales will come from your top 3-5 affiliates. I remember me and one of the guys that worked with me looked at each other like, That’s not true. Not when we run programs. When we run programs, the top three account for 5, 10, maybe 20 % of sales. The top 10 account for 10, 15, 20, 25 % of sales. Because we build a huge diversified affiliate We build what we call an affiliate army. Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of affiliates, sometimes hundreds of thousands of affiliates who are… Some of them might only do one sale a month or two sales a year.
[00:15:43.280] – Matt McWilliams
But when you start adding them up, It’s a lot of sales. The irony is that guy who said that from stage, he said, 90% of your sales will come from your top three to five affiliates. Three years later, after he saw us run an affiliate program for one of his friends, and he saw what we did, and he saw how we had grown that program from a couple million dollars a year to over $10 million a year through building that army, he reached out to us. They became a client. He saw what we were doing, and he saw that his philosophy was no longer true. It might have been true 10, 15 years ago, but it was no longer true today.
[00:16:22.350] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. One of the things I have attempted in this podcast, Matt, is there’s a lot of what I consider misleading and downright lies said about building a membership eLearning-focused business. I’ve tried consistently to put forward methodologies from the startup world, from the bootstrap startup world, about minimum viable product. I go on about minimum viable course, about you do actually have to launch a course to get feedback from your target audience. Totally, yeah. About not too broader audience. If it’s your first course, maybe nicheify. I’m not even sure. I love that word, Matt. I’m not sure if it exists, but I use it. Nishify? Yeah, I like it. You need to find your niche, right? Don’t think I get most of this from the bootstrap startup world. Most of it, I blatantly copy it and I put my own spin on it. The other thing is a lot of people People, really, for understandable reasons, they focus on the course. They start building what I call a war and peace course. They throw the kitchen sink in.
[00:17:58.520] – Matt McWilliams
Everybody’s done that, yeah.
[00:17:59.890] – Jonathan Denwood
And they get obsessed about marketing, automation, about the technology before they got even their first student and got any consistent feedback. So I say, Don’t do all that. But the other thing is actually getting these first students. And I think, is it possible if you haven’t got an enormous amount of experience in online marketing, and you’ve You’ve done some basic things about your course. Is it possible to utilize affiliate marketing to get the will, get the traction, as you know, to get that? As you know, to get the will turned learning is the hardest. To get those first 50, 100 students is going to be the hardest part of this journey, isn’t it?
[00:18:56.740] – Matt McWilliams
It’s the best way to do it. I mean, The alternative is you got to go out and figure out Facebook. You got to find an audience. You got to slowly build an audience, or you got to do SEO, which just takes time. You got to post and post and post to social media and to YouTube, and you’re getting five views early on. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s actually something to be said when you’re very first starting, you don’t want 500 people reading or viewing your content. You want 20 or 30 people. When I started speaking, My very first event that I ever spoke at was not over a thousand people, and I’ve spoken at those. The very first event was at a fish restaurant with 18 people, which actually sometimes can be harder than speaking to a group of hundreds or thousands because it’s so intimate. But I spoke in front of 18 people. If I bombed, and frankly, I did, I wasn’t great. I spoke way too fast. I had 15 minutes. I finished in seven. Nobody’s I’ve never been frustrated with a speaker who finishes a couple of minutes early. But when you finish in half the time, they’re like, what the heck are we supposed to do with these eight minutes now?
[00:20:09.720] – Matt McWilliams
And I got up there and I was literally speaking like a thousand miles an hour, and I’m going like this. And I stayed in about a three foot area and I looked at the same… Actually, I didn’t look at anybody. I looked between the same two people the entire time. I was 22 years old in front of 18 people. Now, if you fast forward the end of that summer, five months later, number one, I developed a strategy that helped me, and that was I took a dose of Pepto-Bismol before I went on live because my stomach would be so upset that I was thinking about my upside stomach. That helped. It calmed my nerves. Some people may take a shot of whiskey. I don’t know. I took Pepto-abysmal, right? And I developed these things and I got used to speaking, and the crowds got progressively bigger. And by a couple of years later, it was nothing for me to go to an event and speak to four, five, six, hundred people. It was another seven, eight years before I ever spoke in front of a thousand plus people. But I would speak to these people and it got better and better.
[00:21:11.500] – Matt McWilliams
There’s something to be said for small audiences early, early on, just so to get your sea legs under you, so to speak. But if you want to grow fast, the absolute fastest way is just go get affiliates, because here’s the thing. We live in a world, this was not true when I got into business. This was not true 24 years ago. But there are so many people, unless you are in the most obscure niche on the face of the Earth, in which case there’s probably only 100 people who have your audience, there are thousands of people who have your audience. I had a conversation the other day. A dear friend of mine, he’s in the weight loss niche. He’s a weight loss coach. He was like, he’s been banging his head against the wall with Facebook ads, and they’re working. He’s profitable. He’s profiting 5, $10,000 a month. But he’s like, I want to take the next level. I’m telling him about, Dude, how many people out there have your audience? He’s like, You mean other weight loss coaches? I was like, No. I have your audience, Allen, because I have 25,000 entrepreneurs on my list.
[00:22:15.360] – Matt McWilliams
And guess what? Statistically speaking, 50% of them are obese. That’s what the statistics say. And guess what? When I know about those 12,500 people, every single one of them is scared to go on camera. Every single one of them is conscious about the way they look. I said, That is 12,500 people. And so we did this webinar to my entrepreneurs list selling a weight loss product. And he signed up eight people into his coaching program, collectively, who have now lost over 500 pounds, by the way, so I’ve changed their lives. One of them, Bob Harris, has lost 78 pounds. The guy’s 62 years old. He hasn’t been under 350 pounds since he was in his late 20s. He’s down to 230. So not only have I changed their lives, but frankly, I made $24,000. That’s a lot of money to promote a simple webinar about weight loss. So there are people out there with your audience already. If you think about it for just a moment, now you may be in a really obscure niche. I don’t know. You manufacture… Okay, I’m just looking at my desk. I’m trying to find something that’s a little bit obscure.
[00:23:23.020] – Matt McWilliams
So you manufacture… Should I have nothing obscure on my desk? Okay. All right, let’s do gym equipment. Gym equipment, I can see my gym. So I have right above my monitor, I can see the top part of my pull-up bar. So I’ve got the pull-up bar. If you sell the pull-up bar, who has your audience? Literally everyone who talks about health and fitness. Now, our 85-year-old women going to buy a pull-up bar? Probably not. So if you have somebody whose audience is age- Oh, I love to meet them, man. I know. That’s age-ish and sexish. I get it. But my point is, they’re probably not the target audience for this. Let’s be honest. And I’m not saying they shouldn’t work out. They should, but that’s a whole different story. But if you have somebody out there who’s got a supplement, they can sell your pull-up bar. If you got somebody out there who teaches weight loss, Alan is a perfect affiliate for that pull-up bar. Are his 40 pound client is going to be knocking out pull-up Sunday one? Absolutely not. But what about Bob? Bob’s down to 220. Bob can probably come pretty darn close to doing a pull-up right now.
[00:24:25.050] – Matt McWilliams
And so my point is people out there already have your audience. They already exist, and you don’t have to pay upfront. You pay after the transaction is made. That’s the beauty of it. So you can cash flow it. Zuckerberg takes your money first, and there’s no guarantee you’re going to make any money. It is absolutely guaranteed 100 % that if you sell a product, for example, for $100 or a membership for $100 a month and pay the affiliate a 40 % commission or 20 % commission or whatever, again, depends on the product, of course. But if you have a membership, $100 a month or a course, $1,000, and you pay the affiliate a percentage, if you lose money, you really suck at math. It is impossible to not make money. In fact, to not make a lot of money. It’s the fastest way to scale course sales, membership sales, product sales, services, you name it.
[00:25:13.180] – Jonathan Denwood
I just got a quick question before we go for our break. I think the other factor is how do you… Obviously, the purpose of this interview is to get people’s interest about affiliate marketing, and then they can go over to your podcast and listen to all the content you’ve got, and they can go over to your website. The purpose of me bringing you on to this podcast is to to my tribe, is to give them a glimpse and some of the key concepts, and then if they’re interested, they can go over and do further research, Matt. We can’t give them the keys of the kingdom in a one-hour check, can we? But we can give them some insights, and hopefully, they come to the understanding that you have a lot of knowledge in the particular area, right? But it’s a bit daunting. You got these affiliate market places, where you sign up and you You got to have a certain amount of traffic, or there’s some parameters that they want you to fulfill, and they’ve got a whole ecosystem of affiliate markets. Would you join one of those, or would you Or would you do the initial outreach, build your own list of people that you think would be good affiliates, and then you personally outreach them?
[00:26:56.910] – Jonathan Denwood
How would you initially approach this?
[00:27:01.110] – Matt McWilliams
Yeah, very first place I would start is my friends. Any relationships you currently have, no matter how loose that relationship is, maybe you’re in a group together, you’re in a mastermind together, you’re in a forum together, something like that. I would start with friends. The simple reason is they’re going to give you the most grace. The reality is we talked about public speaking and how I sucked at first. Your affiliate program is probably not going to be all that great on day one. You’re going to make mistakes. Things are going to break. The tech is going to break, whatever. As much as you can get those very early adopters, I’m not talking for months, I’m talking for days or weeks, to be people that you already have an existing relationship who aren’t in it for the money. In other words, if they send a thousand people and only convert 40 of them and they only make 1,600 bucks instead of the expected 3,000. They’re not going to say, You know what? Screw you, Jonathan. I’m done. They’re going to say, Hey, we’re friends. Hey, thanks for the 1,600 bucks. I’ll promote you again in a few months when things are a little bit better.
[00:28:02.790] – Matt McWilliams
They’re going to give you that grace. So always start there. The second place that I would look, the forms and the groups of affiliates, the biggest problem with those, number one, getting access to them. Number two, not If we want to get moving today, the best time to join an affiliate group is a year before you need anybody to promote. So you can contribute. So I’m not saying don’t join, but that’s a second month thing. Your very first month, we want to get up and running quickly. Again, start with friends, get them promoting, work through some of the kinks. I’m doing this with a client right now. We launched this past Monday. We’re recording this on a Friday. Five days ago, we launched, and We started with his previous connections. We started with 50 people. That was it. Fifty people. Why? Because we’ve already discovered that the phone verification on the payment, you know what? It works in the United States, but it doesn’t work outside the United States. Oops, we didn’t know that. Why? None of us are outside of the United States. We had 14 people testing this thing. All of us are in the US.
[00:29:06.440] – Matt McWilliams
We never knew. We broke it. Now we fixed it. It took a day and we fixed it. We found a couple of other little problems that we, as people who predominantly use Chrome as the browser and are pretty tech savvy, didn’t notice a couple of the issues that a less tech savvy person on Internet Explorer or Firefox would have. And so we’ve been able to work through those with 50 people. Now Now we’re ready to go big time because we’ve already fixed everything. But the second place that I would look is I would go out and I would immediately start picking off your customers affiliates. I want to pick off my customers affiliates one by one. All right. And so what I’m going to do is I’m going to start reaching out to… If you have customers, by the way, if you already have existing customers, I guess I should have said, If you have existing customers, those would actually come right after your friends. So your friends are the ones that we would want to reach out to first, then our customers. I’m making the assumption that you don’t have customers. So your competitor’s affiliates.
[00:30:18.140] – Matt McWilliams
I want to take some time. I want to look up who’s promoting my affiliates, and then create a list of those people. Literally, you just go to Google, type in your competitor’s names, I probably wouldn’t go. If you’re in a world where your competitors are Walmart and then Jim Bob’s local tackle shop, I would start with Jim Bob’s local tackle shop and not go after Walmart’s affiliates. Unless, we’ll get to this in a second unless you have a really good angle. Then I’m going to look at their website. I’m going to start reaching out to them. But the first thing I need to do after that is I’m going to find the angle. I’ve got to find the angle that I can get to convince them to become an affiliate. Do I Do I have better commissions? Do I pay faster? As an example of years ago, with that affiliate program that I mentioned that I started, our largest competitor got purchased by a huge hedge fund, Large Publicly Traded Company actually. This company had a reputation of treating people like a number, not a person. It sucked that they were getting bought by them because it meant they had more money than they know what to do with.
[00:31:29.180] – Matt McWilliams
We’re like, we’re probably going to get probably going to get destroyed. But I had this idea in the place where people tend to have ideas, or at least men have ideas on the toilet. Just being honest, I had this idea on the toilet. It hit me one day. I said, What if I could use that against them? What if I could use their bigness against them? I started reaching out to every single one of their affiliates one by one, and I basically said, Hey, you may have heard that such and such company got bought by so and so, and they treat people like a number, not a person. I don’t believe in that. I want to treat you as an affiliate like you’re a person. I want to get to know you. I want to be able to customize our offers to your audience. Here’s my cell phone, my personal cell phone number, text call me anytime. And one by one, I started picking off those affiliates. Now, we had to have better creative than them. We had to have better conversions than them. We couldn’t to be worse in those categories. But I found that angle, that unique angle, to be able to reach out to them.
[00:32:34.930] – Matt McWilliams
And so we start reaching out to those competitors because, again, they know affiliate marketing, they know the market, they have experience. And if I I can get them, it’s actually a double win because now not only am I gaining, say, $1,000 a month in sales, but my competitor is losing $1,000 a month in sales. So it’s a little bit of a double win, too.
[00:32:57.760] – Jonathan Denwood
That was fabulous, Matt. Thank you so much for that insight. We’re going to go for our middle break. We got a couple of messages from our sponsors that we really appreciate. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a feast of knowledge from Matt. He’s been on fire. He’s warming up to the task, I can tell. He’s smiling a little bit more. Yes, he looks a little bit happier, but there we go. Before we go into the second half, I just want to point out we’ve got a fabulous Facebook group, the Membership Machine Show Group. If you’re looking to build your membership website on WordPress and you’re looking for a great community that can support you in doing this, and you need to do it. The first step of a thousand mile, the first point of a thousand mile journey is the first step. I mutt that up, but the essence of was quite true, is that first step, and joining a great group can help with that. We love you to come over and join. So, Matt, any trends or anything you’ve noticed over the coming past 12 months that are changing in the world of affiliate marketing?
[00:34:25.370] – Jonathan Denwood
Anything that’s coming on your radar that you think you can share?
[00:34:30.200] – Matt McWilliams
Yeah, two big things. I mean, one has been an evolving trend that I mentioned earlier over the last decade plus. Just the movement from relying on a small group of bigger affiliates and building that army, that diversified army, that army that is, again, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of affiliates, many of whom are going to be small affiliates. I didn’t mention earlier, but one of the big benefits of that is your risk exposure is pretty dramatically diminished because if you lose one of 100,000 affiliates who’s doing a few sales, you don’t even notice it. You lose one of your five or six big affiliates, you notice it. And so it really that’s one of the biggest trends. That’s just been evolving for over a decade now. The second one in the last year or so is just the increase in customized promotions. And AI has really made this a lot easier. And I’ll give you an example. In affiliate marketing, if you know affiliate marketing, you know that affiliate programs should provide their affiliates with what’s known as swipe copy. So if we want you to send an email today, a announcing a big promotion or a product launch or whatever, we’ll give you swipe copy.
[00:35:50.880] – Matt McWilliams
And traditionally, what we’ve done is we’ve written one or two or three versions of that, maybe for different audiences. So we’ll have a version for stay at home moms and version for entrepreneurs and a faith-based version of swiped copy. Actually, those are three real examples from a promotion we’re doing right now. But with AI, it’s really easy to create custom swiped copy for individual affiliates. And make their job a lot easier. What I’ve done is, say we’re running one affiliate program right now, we don’t do this for everybody, but we’ll take the top three, four, five dozen affiliates, 30 to 60 affiliates, and we will create a language model that’s essentially just us dumping 30 or 40 of their emails, 30 or 40 of their Facebook posts, 100 or so of their shorter social media messages, and we’ll just create a language model of their actual stuff. And then we take that, we’ve trained the model, that takes an hour per affiliate, and then we’ll take our generic swipe copy and say, Hey, please write this in the style of Jonathan Denwood.
[00:37:01.030] – Jonathan Denwood
And it creates- You definitely don’t want to do that, Matt. That would put off people.
[00:37:06.740] – Matt McWilliams
But now I can go to you, Jonathan, and say, Here’s a seven email, a five day seven email campaign, specifically written for you. And affiliates are loving it. What we’ve noticed is they’re sending… Typically, if I go to them and say, Hey, here’s seven emails to send over the next five days, they’ll pick two or three they like, and that’s it. They’re liking six or seven of them, all seven. Sometimes they’re liking, occasionally we’ll make two versions, maybe a short and a long version of each of those emails, and now they’re sending all seven emails. And so that’s something that I used to do on a very small scale. I do it for three or four affiliates, but I had to pay a copywriter to learn their style and try to write in their style. And it cost me a thousand to fifteen hundred bucks or sometimes two grand.
[00:37:58.010] – Jonathan Denwood
And it’s not even How is it? I don’t really experience copyright there, is it?
[00:38:02.520] – Matt McWilliams
Yeah, but now it’s easy. I mean, with AI, I can train the AI to sound just… My AI, personally, I haven’t edited an email in months. It sounds just like me. Even the obscure… It even puts in the random things that I’m like, How did you even know to put that? It’s personal information. It’s It’s almost a little bit scary. We’re able to do that. That’s been a big change for affiliate programs.
[00:38:35.310] – Jonathan Denwood
Are we all going to be replaced soon, Matt. There’s no hope for us. We’re doomed.
[00:38:40.560] – Matt McWilliams
Not replaced, augmented.
[00:38:44.520] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that would be the better. That’s the more optimistic. I’m English, so I’m full of doomed. There we go. He started to laugh at my jokes, folks. It’s a good sign. I I think he’s making a judgment call. Is this guy a total idiot or is he just acting?
[00:39:05.760] – Matt McWilliams
That’s a question for you. You’re English, so who’s your team? Who’s your Premier League team?
[00:39:13.050] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, it was Chelsea. I got a lot of stick for that, actually, because I was brought up in North London, so it should be Arsenal or West Ham, but I always migrated to Chelsea, and I always got a lot of stick for that, mate. All right. There we go. Come on, England, on Sunday. We can win. We could do it.
[00:39:36.810] – Matt McWilliams
It’s going to be big.
[00:39:38.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s big. It’s not on the list of questions, Matt, but next month, the Influencer marketer manager of Wix has agreed to come on the show, and I’ve been following her for a while. I’ve invited the enemy, Matt, but no. It’s this, what I would call this Witcher Brew of affiliate marketing with influencer marketing and the boundaries. Because there’s been quite a few influencers, and in some ways I hate the title because somebody writing a book is a influencer. Somebody going to a speaker, Phil, is influencer. It’s not just trying to utilize that term just for online people. I always thought it was a bit ridiculous, but it’s around boundaries because there’s quite a few influencers on YouTube, on TikTok that have got themselves into a bit of a pickle about the boundaries of affiliate marketing and their own tribe. I struggle with it. I have clear boundaries about who become long-term sponsors. I love them. I’ve got a small group that have signed up for a year to be sponsors of this show and my other show, which is a bit bigger, Matt. I’m up to my 920th episode, Matt. That’s amazing. Yeah, God, am I’m getting that.
[00:41:32.920] – Jonathan Denwood
But a lot of other people got into a pickle. How do you advise? Is this something you thought about? Is it just down to common sense and respecting your audience? But a few people that got into a real pickle about all this, they’re pretty sharp people. Or is it just greed? They just see the green and they forget about their reputation and their audience.
[00:42:02.790] – Matt McWilliams
For me, it goes back to the first rule of affiliate marketing is only promote good products that you would recommend to your mother. If it was a good product for your mother. I I say, again, my mother is not the target audience for the pull-up bar, so I would not recommend that to her. But if my mom came to me and said, I need to buy a good pull-up bar for so-and-so, this is the one. I would recommend So it doesn’t mean you have to use it yourself. To be clear, I’ll give you an example. A lot of people say that, I only recommend products that I use, but you might be 10 years advanced compared to your audience. So I don’t use Mailchimp, but I recommend Mailchimp to beginners. I don’t use Mailchimp. Why would I recommend something I don’t know. Because my audience, some of them who are literally starting their email list, they have zero subscribers. Why Why would I recommend that they pay for something? So there are times where I recommend a product that I don’t use. So that’s not a qualifier to me. If I can go online and find good reviews of it, I do not drive a pickup truck, for example.
[00:43:21.670] – Matt McWilliams
If my mom says, What pickup truck should I buy? I’m going to have to go to Consumer Reports and other organizations and read the reviews and look at how people are rating and what’s the cost. Then I can make an educated recommendation and say, It’s one of these two. Why don’t you go test drive those two? Does that make me disingenuous because I don’t own that one of those two pickup trucks? Of course not. Because she asked me for my help with something that does not apply to me. I can only own one car. My wife and I each have a car, so I guess technically I do own two. But you get the idea there. I’m I’m not going to go get 17 cars in case somebody ask me how they are. That’s ridiculous. I don’t believe that you have to use a product that you recommend or a service that you recommend. Recommend what is best for your audience. If you stick to that, there is never a risk of getting caught recommending something that turns out to be a scam or getting caught to recommend something that ends up being a two-star product.
[00:44:28.930] – Matt McWilliams
If that Pull up bar, I keep going back to that because it’s right in my vision. If that thing were garbage, I would not recommend it. Or here’s another thing, I would not recommend that if your budget is under $400. If you really need a less expensive one that doesn’t take up as much space. I don’t recommend that. That’s not disingenuous for me to say. That’s the biggest thing. If you just stick to that, I’m only going to recommend products that I would recommend to my mother if it was good for her and fits my audience’s price point, you’re good. Everything else takes care of yourself. There’s the legal stuff. You have to abide by the FTC laws and the California laws and the EU laws. No matter what, you say, Well, I’m not in the United States. But if you have one person who ever buys a product through your affiliate link from the United States, or the company is in the United States, or that product was so much as main, has ever touched the United States, you have to abide by United States law. So, yes, you need to disclose that you’re an affiliate.
[00:45:38.830] – Matt McWilliams
If you got free, I’ll give you an example. These things here, these blue light glasses, I got them for free. If I were to recommend them, I do not recommend them, by the way, they’re mediocre. I’m sure they’re better, and I’ll probably find a better pair. But if I were to say, These are the most amazing things ever. They have saved me. I never get headaches. My eyes have gotten better, and I’m 3 feet taller as a result, and I’ve lost 42 pounds because these blue light glasses, I would have to disclose the fact that these things normally cost $25, and I got them for free. If I don’t do that, I have broken the law. Now, am I going to get caught? Here’s the thing. I’ll just say, Probably not, but you could, and then you and that company are both in a world of hurt because you have broken the law. So disclose, anything like that. Just be open and honest, and yours should be good.
[00:46:29.480] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m thinking I think you’re so right. I think it’s just being honest and disclosure. I think a lot of influencers, they’ve just seen the green too much. The thing with the WordPress community, Matt, is that there’s a certain element that can be more a bit holier than now because it’s open source. I expect people to talk their book of business. Doesn’t bother me. They’re running a business, so it doesn’t really bother me, Matt. Sometimes I’ve had to… You’ve been fine, but There’s some people that have been come on, and I’ve had to cut the interview a bit short because it’s just been a constant PR pitch with very little educational value. Nobody likes to say it. It’s all about balance, isn’t it?
[00:47:33.660] – Matt McWilliams
It drives me nuts when I listen to an interview with an author who has a book coming out, and you ask the author the interview, you ask the question, and they go, Well, I cover that in the book. That That’s the wrong answer. Now, the better way, and this is actually a little trick for me, but this is what I teach. I teach our clients because we run book launches as a part of our services. I say, Here’s how you answer it. Let’s say they ask you a thing, and there are five things, right? You list five. I don’t know. I’m just going to make… I’ll share an example. They ask you, What are the five best places to find affiliates? I’m writing a book about this. I’m going to say, Listen, in the Or they just say, what are the best places to find affiliates? Say, Listen, in the book, I share five ways. Let me share the top way with you right now. And then I will spend five minutes sharing the top way. I will give you a master class for all intents and purposes without actually it because that just sounds your reading the audiobook version of way number one.
[00:48:35.780] – Matt McWilliams
If you never buy the book, you leave the interview, and you have one really good way that if you execute, that single way grew our affiliate program to over a million dollars a month. Now, if you want to grow it like we did over the next three years into a four and a half million dollar a month affiliate program, you need to know the other four ways. You need to go buy the book. But if you just want to get… I hate that when it’s like, Well, I talk about it in the book. Great.
[00:49:02.960] – Jonathan Denwood
The only one… It’s only been in my eight years experience of podcasting, it’s only been one or two that I’ve literally had to cut the interview short. So I A bit. I’m not sure. Do you want to cover AI anymore? Because your previous example of using AI was really quite great. Do you want to cover that at all anymore? Or do you want to go to the last question?
[00:49:30.230] – Matt McWilliams
Yeah, there’s nothing. Ai, it’s a huge part now. I think, again, the biggest ways that we use it are creating swipe copy, creating social media copy. It just makes it faster. It’s not like it was impossible before, but it’s faster and scalable. I can create custom swipe copy for 50 affiliates for a 7 to 10 email campaign. I can do it in a day. That used to be, if I to do that, it would take me 25 days, so I wouldn’t do it. I would do it for, like I said, three or four and be done. That’s the first way that we’re using AI. The only other way that we’re really, really using AI is not in affiliate, like specifically finding the affiliates. That hasn’t worked very well. Well, there’s two ways, actually. The second one is in identifying markets. So if I’ve got, I’ll give you an example. One of our clients is a supplement, it’s a digestive supplement called Zyve. And if you have an audience, by the way, oh, yeah, here’s my pitch, Jonathan. If you have an audience for that, please email me anytime, and I’ll… Okay. Just kidding. But it’s a digestive supplement.
[00:50:51.560] – Jonathan Denwood
You’ve given a lot of value in this interview. If you want to do something like pitch, get at it. You’ve done a good job, mate.
[00:51:01.390] – Matt McWilliams
It’s a digestive supplement. It literally has, for me, has helped me with upset stomachs, helped my daughter, cleared off eczema, liver function, blood sugar. It does a lot of things, right? I used AI to say, Okay, what are some competitive products with a product that does this? Because none of us know all the competition and know all the market. I started asking, Okay, people who buy… This is where I started going. People who buy products for blood sugar management, what other products do they buy? They may have nothing to do with what Zyve does, but here’s the thing. I’ll give you an example. We found, for instance, that Turmeric, which is a natural anti-inflammatory, if you know Turmeric, the yellow stuff that’s in saffron and whatnot, it’s great. I take a Turmeric supplement myself. But people who take Turmeric are disproportionately likely to also take other things. If we can target Turmeric supplement companies’ affiliates, it’s a completely non-competitive product. You can literally promote the turmeric product and promote Zyve. We used AI to just think of, basically just be a second brain, really high-powered brain, think, Okay, what are other people buying? And how can we keep finding more and more and more and more and more Don’t ask because it’s going to be a while.
[00:52:32.460] – Matt McWilliams
But what we’re doing is actually using AI so that the average person, a person running a sub seven figure a month affiliate program that cannot hire somebody like us. If you’re doing $200,000 a month, it is impractical to hire us. We’re expensive. We are worth it to people doing a lot of money, but you’re not going to be able to hire us. So if you’re running your own affiliate program, Or maybe it’s like you and a business partner, and then you have two VAs, and the business partner is running the affiliate program, but he needs to do it in an hour a day. He can’t spend, like we do, six, eight hours a day running your affiliate program. He needs to do it in 45 minutes to hour, hour and a half a day. The AI, when you log in, will actually tell you, it’ll say, Hey, Jonathan, how much time do you have today? And you’ll put in, you’ll select from a menu like 30 minutes an hour, hour and a half, two hours. You’re like, Cool, you have one hour. Here are the four things that you should do with that hour. And it’ll say, Number one, check out these four affiliates.
[00:53:39.750] – Matt McWilliams
They are down month over month over last month, more than 25 %. You should reach out to them and give you some sample emails that you can use. Number two, these two affiliates are converting at a really high rate. That could be a good sign or it might be a sign of fraud. You should investigate. And it’ll go on and on. Number three, you haven’t run a promo in over a month. Maybe it’s a good time to offer a sale. Here are three promotions you’ve run in the past that have converted really well. And so we’ll be using AI to basically just guide you. The AI is going to give you sample emails, but it’s not going to send the email for it. It’s not going to literally be your affiliate manager. It’s just going to be that second brain, almost like you had a data analyst who’d been working the previous 24 hours so that when you walked in the office, think about what you’re… And it’s like an executive executive assistant that you have. You walk in the office and that executive assistant, if you ever worked with one, is like, Here’s what you’re doing today.
[00:54:37.630] – Matt McWilliams
That’s essentially what this AI tool will be. It’s like, Here’s what you need to do today, Jonathan. Go do it.
[00:54:42.560] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think you got some great points there because I was thinking, I think I had another Fomala podcast yesterday and we were discussing, and you probably heard of the product SparkToro from Fishkin. It helps you identify Identify if you’re trying to build a persona, persona is your target audience. And Fishkin was the SEO expert.
[00:55:11.960] – Matt McWilliams
Yeah, ran.
[00:55:12.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Ran, yeah. I’ve actually interviewed him a couple of times, actually. Nice guy. And he’s got this product, and I was saying on my other podcast, Matt, that that’s one of the areas that I saw artificial intelligence really helping you do persona research because it’s so time consuming. And I think you got some really great examples there that it really helps in this research area. So thanks for that. So the last question, and I just want to point out here, Matt, a few of my guests get a bit worried about this last question because they think it’s got to be something dramatic. I’ll leave it to you, because obviously the person that we started on our business journey isn’t the person that we are now. That would be a bit sad. So the advice that you would probably give yourself at the beginning, you probably wouldn’t listen to because you’re a totally different person in your journey. Because I know when I was 23, 24, I was an arrogant little shit. You’re not surprised, are you, Matt? But there we go.. There we go. So it doesn’t have to be a big thing. It could be a couple of small, one small thing.
[00:56:42.420] – Jonathan Denwood
But if you’re at the beginning of your business career, you had your own time machine, like H. G. Wells, or if you’re into Doctor Who, your own tardiness. You could go back and give yourself a little bit of advice. Is there One or two little things that you would love to know that you didn’t know at the beginning?
[00:57:05.060] – Matt McWilliams
Yeah. Number one, ask who not how. I actually think that Dan Sullivan wrote a book called that, if I’m not mistaken. But work on developing a network, develop relationships with people. I mentioned earlier, don’t ever get somebody that you should know their spouse’s name and say, How’s your wife? How’s your husband doing? No. Know their name. When their team wins, you I better congratulate them. I learned a little trick probably about a decade ago, and I wish I could give credit to whoever told me this, but I don’t remember who told me. He said, Anytime you’re in line and you’re waiting, so The other night, I went to pick up food for the kids, and I went inside to a, not really a fast food place, but where you go up to the counter in order and you have about 10 minutes to wait. I spent those 10 minutes texting people, just randomly. I just picked random people out of my network, people I hadn’t texted in a while. A lot of times, I’ll just purposely go to the very bottom of my text threads and just work my way up. Texted six people. Then four or five of them reply.
[00:58:12.490] – Matt McWilliams
We had a back and forth, and I re-caught up with them. Scheduled a couple of calls, probably going to do some business with one of them. That was worth 10 minutes of my time. Just investing in those relationships so that nowadays, when I need something, I don’t Google it and try to figure it out myself. I ask. I say, You know what? One of these three people probably knows. Boom, text them. If I’m really unsure, I’ll go to Facebook and post it on Facebook, and I’ll get 5 or 10 replies within an hour of people who have an answer for me. A better answer than Google is ever going to get me. So that would probably be the biggest thing. It’s just asking who not how. You already know people who know how to do the stuff that you want to do. Years ago, when I needed to start developing developing terms and conditions or an agreement for affiliates. I didn’t Google it. You can Google it now, and I think my post may or may not be the number one post for that. But back then, I didn’t Google it. I texted a few of my affiliate manager friends and said, Do you have a template?
[00:59:13.290] – Matt McWilliams
Every one of them sent back a template. I took the best parts of each one, boom, had a template. Could have spent a lot of money, could have spent a lot of time. Took me 20, 30 minutes doing that. When we’re creating this network, this affiliate network, I didn’t try to think. I didn’t I didn’t look up. I just texted and emailed and posted on Facebook to my friends, said, What are you looking for in a network? We got enough responses that we’ll build the world’s best affiliate network. So thinking of who not how, you don’t need to learn new stuff. If you want to learn new stuff just for fun, I’m learning principles of graphic design just for fun because that’s actually entertaining for me. I am learning Mandarin. Why? Because I want to speak Mandarin, but I’m not I’m not learning that because I need to learn it. That’s just entertainment for me. But if there’s stuff you need to learn, ask who not how. That’s the best thing I can tell anybody. It’s all about relationships and networking, which is exactly what affiliate programs are, for the record.
[01:00:17.500] – Jonathan Denwood
Thanks, Matt. That was fabulous.
[01:00:18.950] – Matt McWilliams
My pleasure.
[01:00:20.600] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve really enjoyed our discussion, actually. You’re very American, though. You’re a bit intense, but you really- Very American.
[01:00:28.920] – Matt McWilliams
I’m going to get a shirt that says that. It says, I’m very American. How about that? Well, American, no.
[01:00:34.350] – Jonathan Denwood
But certain types of Americans, they’re very down to it. But you’ve really been very generous in your knowledge. I’ve actually really enjoyed the interview. It’s been one of the better ones this year, actually.
[01:00:49.170] – Matt McWilliams
Thank you. I’ll leave you with this because you’ll appreciate this as a Brit.
[01:00:53.160] – Jonathan Denwood
I honestly mean that. If you listen to any of the other, I don’t normally say that. I’ve been Because you never know what you’re going to get within a view because it has its own life, as you know. Sure.
[01:01:09.450] – Matt McWilliams
Well, let me leave you with this, Jonathan because as a Brit, you’ll appreciate this. I did my ancestry recently, and I knew a little bit of most of it, but I always thought I was mostly just British and Austrian. From one side of the family, I was primarily British. I found out that one side is actually British and German. Basically, it’s a quarter German and 75% Irish and Scottish, with a little bit of English in there. Then, the other side is this hodgepodge. There’s German, South England, and some Dutch, and Then to my surprise, it got to be really complicated. Then, at the very end, I found out that I was part French, and I just said I gave up.
[01:01:56.670] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, yeah, I would. If you got a bit of French, I would give up as I love the French, especially French women. It’s a lovely language I could listen to forever.
[01:02:08.740] – Matt McWilliams
Italian is a little bit better, though.
[01:02:11.200] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, they’re all great. Matt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to, Matt.
[01:02:18.360] – Matt McWilliams
So, whatever you’re on your favorite podcast player right now, go type the word affiliate. Usually, it’s the first thing that pops up. You’ll see my smiling face and the affiliate guy there. So type in affiliate. You should be able to find me pretty quickly otherwise, if you go to mattmcwilliams. com/machine, that’s a URL we created just for your audience there, Jonathan, that will take them to… I’ve got a free report that we put together all about how to find your first 100 affiliates. So we covered your friends and the customers and competitions. There are actually 12 other ways to find affiliates, things that most people have never thought of, ways that have worked for us over the air. There are some email templates in there for reaching out to them. If you go mattmcwilliams. com/machine, you can find that.
[01:03:04.990] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic, Matt. Thank you so much for… Matt’s been quite generous coming on the show. He’s been very busy dealing with various things, and he had to reschedule. and I do appreciate you coming on the show, Matt. I think it’s been a pleasure.
[01:03:22.280] – Matt McWilliams
Thanks for having me.
[01:03:23.500] – Jonathan Denwood
I think it’s been a fabulous discussion, tribe. We have some great guests coming up in July. We also got my regular co-host, Harun, and we talked about more technical stuff around WordPress and membership. The show’s growing. Thank you so much. We’ll see you next week. Bye.
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