Marketing Secrets with Russell Brunson - The Long Forgotten Power of Correct Affiliate Marketing Implementation

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

In my last Inner Circle, one of the last strategies I shared was on a topic that, surprisingly, still drives more than 50% of the traffic to ClickFunnels – Affiliate Marketing. Despite the buzz around Facebook, Google, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube ads, affiliate marketing remains a powerful and often overlooked strategy. I shared my insights and strategies on how to build a successful affiliate program, drawing from my personal experience and the journey of launching ClickFunnels. In the early days, traffic generation was primarily through joint ventures and affiliate partnerships. This episode highlights how a properly managed affiliate strategy can significantly reduce the risks and costs associated with paid advertising. Plus, instead of paying upfront for ads, affiliate marketing allows you to pay only when a sale is made, making it a stress-free and efficient way to grow your business. Key Highlights: Two-Tier Affiliate Programs: Understand the benefits of offering a two-tier affiliate program to incentivize and expand your affiliate network. Partner With Anthony Model: Get insights into Anthony Morrison’s successful affiliate model that leverages low-cost training programs to drive high affiliate conversions. Dream 100 Strategy: Discover the Dream 100 approach we used to launch ClickFunnels and generate massive awareness. Building an Affiliate Program: Learn how to structure your affiliate program to attract and retain top affiliates. Integration Marketing: How to get your best affiliates promoting you on autopilot so sales keep coming. If you're looking to scale your business and cut down on advertising costs, this episode is packed with actionable advice to help you harness the power of affiliate marketing. Listen and learn how to leverage affiliate partnerships to drive traffic and sales effectively! Don't forget to check out this awesome deal from Mint Mobile! https://mintmobile.com/funnels And if you want to enjoy the Marketing Secrets Show ad-free, check out http://marketingsecrets.com/adfree Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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so many things we talk about. Everyone's always freaking out about Facebook ads and Google and Instagram and YouTube, but to this day, more than 50% of the traffic to ClickFunnels still comes from this one traffic source that we never talk about. At a recent event, I kind of went off on this and I talked for, I don't know, 45 minutes or so talking about how to get traffic from affiliates, what we're doing and how it works. And it's funny to me because we used to have this conversation back when I first got started because there wasn't Facebook, wasn't Instagram. Like the way we all got traffic when we first got started was through affiliates. So all of our conversations, all the seminars, all the events were just talking about that one topic. And nowadays, I go to an event and nobody's talking about it, yet it's still the way that we use to drive the majority of our traffic, despite the fact we're spending a million dollars plus a month on paid ads.

And so I wanted to go deep with that and just get you guys the wheels of your heads re-spinning about how to use affiliates to start growing your company, to drive more traffic, to get sales. The best thing about affiliates is that like, you know, with Zuckerberg, you buy ads, you give them money up front, whether people buy or not. With affiliates, the risk is on them. Like you convince them to promote, they promote. And if they make a sale, then you pay them a percentage of the sales. There's no risk.

There's no stress. Like it's such a better way to run and build and grow a business. So that said, today we're going to dive deep into some strategies about building your own affiliate program and getting other people to promote your products and your services for you. In the last decade, I went from being a startup entrepreneur to selling over a billion dollars in my own products and services online. This show is going to show you how to start, grow and scale a business online. My name is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. Okay. How many guys right now have an affiliate program inside of your businesses as active? Okay. Interesting. How many guys do not? So we have more of the do nots

than the do. Okay. All right. A couple of things. Number one is back in the day when I got started 20 some odd years ago, we didn't have Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. Um, we have any of those things, right? And it's funny cause I think back to like, how did we get traffic back then? Only thing we really had, we had email lists, their Google ads, and that was about it. And so usually what happened, people would buy Google ads to build an email list and then you promote each other's things. Like 90% of the way we got traffic back 20 years ago was all us doing joint ventures. Like that's what everything was.

Getting affiliates, calling people on the phone, which me as a super introverted person who's number one fear on this planet is picking up the phone. I had to like stretch to be able to do that, but it's the only way that we could grow our companies. And so I built a lot of relationships with people and that's kind of how I kicked things off. And it was doing the, um, doing a lot of joint ventures where I'd promote their product. They promote ours, things like that.

Fast forward then, whatever, 10, 12 years later is when we launched ClickFunnels and when we launched ClickFunnels, we did not do any advertising. We had no one on Team New Advertising. We didn't have, we weren't running Facebook ads, like none of that stuff. The only thing we had,

the only tool we had was joint ventures and so some of you guys had asked me kind of how we structure things initially when we launched ClickFunnels, so I'll talk about that first and I'm going to show you the evolution of what we're doing. That's really exciting. And this evolution, by the way, the whole goal of all the things I'm trying to do in my business right now, or how do I do things where I can cut Zuckerberg off? And so the whole idea came from that and now it's turned into something, um, really, really cool. I think you're gonna love. So, okay. So the first launch ClickFunnels,

number one thing we did is yes, the dream 100. We did the dream 100. Just like I tell everyone over and over again, I did the dream 100 and I was like, how do I get, um, the, the information that we're launching this thing in front of people's faces. And so back then I'd seen somebody online who'd done a video card. Now they're kind of famous. But no one had done it before.

I saw it in some weird industry where someone had these video cards. We have a message, you open it and the video starts playing. And so, um, when we're launching click funnels, it's like, we need to do these video cards. And it was really hard because there's only one person I think in Hong Kong who was actually making these things. We found the company. And so we made it. So first thing we did is we did these video cards for our dream 100. That was how we kind of kicked off, uh, awareness that we were launching a company called click funnels. That's how it started. Um, and then, um, you guys have heard the story before. We launched it first where everyone's promoting

free trial and it didn't really convert and, and no one knew what ClickFunnels was and it was confusing and just, it kind of, we launched with affiliates and the ones who promoted it just kind of died and didn't do a lot, right? Dang it. And then fast forward a few months later is when I had a chance to go to an event. I wrote the webinar pitch for click funnels, did the webinar. Um, it converted. And now I was like, we had, we had a model, right? Um, and anyway, I'm not gonna go deep in the whole model, but obviously, you know, webinar, linchpin, all that kind of stuff. Um, but we had a webinar. So what we do, um, is I go out there, I would do the webinar first into our own list, made a bunch of money. And I had the stats. It was like, Hey, I did the webinar. We got a thousand people register. We made X amount of dollars.

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

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

So then all of a sudden they would go and they would contact all their friends like, Hey, I just did Russell's webinar. We made $6 for every register, whatever the numbers were. They kind of brag about it and say, do you want to do a webinar with Russell? And they would connect to me with all these different people. So they might connect me with five different people. Those five people come to me and then I would do a webinar to them. So I did a webinar for that person's list, that person, that person, right?

And the person who did the webinar got 40% commission and the person referred them got 10%. So everyone's happy. Then I took the data from all those five webinars. I put it on the sheet. So-and-so's webinar, we got, they got 300 registrants. We made $12 per lead, whatever. So we get building out this document of just all the case studies of what happened, right? Um, and then those five people, I asked the same question, Hey, we have a two chair affiliate program. Do you have any friends who you think would want to promote this webinar? And all of them do people who have what, who do webinars, no people do webinars. And they're like, yeah, definitely. Here's three of my friends. This is the webinar. So they introduced me, they introduced

me, they introduced me and they kept going and going and going. And that's how I did 70 whatever webinars in the first live webinars. The first couple of months of launch launch, you click funnels was that that was the process and the path to chair affiliate program, 40% of first tier commission, 10% second tier. And then we process and the path. Two-tier affiliate program, 40% of first-tier commission, 10% second-tier, and then we do a webinar, have success, get their friends,

do a webinar, and just kept growing from there. Does that make sense? So that's how we launched ClickFunnels, how it started growing. We've paid out, I think, over $150 million in affiliate commissions since ClickFunnels first launched,

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

It was over in the knitting factory. And if you remember, Anthony Morrison spoke. How many of you guys remember that? He streamed it because he wasn't able to come. It's in the members area, by the way, if you haven't listened to this. But he shared this model and what he's doing. And Anthony's one of our, he was our number one affiliate for like five years inside of ClickFunnels.

And actually, it's doing. And Anthony's one of our, he was our number one affiliate for like five years inside of ClickFunnels. Um, and it actually was interesting. The top five affiliates are all using a variation of this model, uh, perfectly. So I'd Anthony come and share that. He shared the model with everybody and I haven't yet to see anybody actually do what he did. Um, including me. And I've listened to that probably three times over the last couple of last couple of years. I'm like, I know there's something I just need to do it. I need to do it. So I'm going to walk you through what Anthony's model is. It's really powerful. So Anthony has a site called partner with Anthony P W a and Anthony basically has a site and he charges $7 a month to be cut, to join the site. You sign up for it and it's a training program. It's going to teach you how to be successful as an affiliate marketer, right? And you go into the

site and there's a whole like train program, like a day, number one, you're going to do these things. Day number two, do these things. And he walks you through and it's got like a, I don't know, 40, 50, 60 day free training, not free training course, $7 a month for this training course. But he doesn't, but that's the only thing he sells is the $7 a month. That's the only product that Anthony actually has. Everything else is just, he's referring different things. Okay. And so this is how he became a number one affiliate is on like day three or something. It's like, Hey, you need to funnel. Here's a share funnel link that you need to have. Go sign up for click funnels and go get your thing. And it pushes it through his affiliate link. Um, and from that he gets, yeah, tons of people. And, um, in this, in these days of training, you know, five, day four,

five, six, whatever. He has other things he recommends. Like he recommends an email autoresponder system. He recommends. So as an affiliate, he, he promotes different things that he's other companies. That's how he's making his money. Correct. And then what's cool is that affiliate programs like ours, like click funnels, we have a two tier affiliate program. So Anthony does is if you sign with parts and partner with Anthony, you can basically take his system. You can promote it as an affiliate, right? And then you get the $7 a month as an affiliate. And then when someone signs up for click funnels, um, you get the commissions and Anthony gets second tier commissions. Does that make sense? The way he's programmed the software. And so this for him has become, became very, very viral. And a member of Anthony told, told us on the thing, he's like,

I've got a hundred different products, but I only promote one on paid ads. And what they do in paid ads is this people buy this. And then this training is free training. People love me. They're going through it. They love it. And from there, I'm recommending click funnels. I'm recommending buy this product and all the revenue comes from him promoting other products. Sometimes I recommend his own product in here, but he never, he never physically buys ads from any of his other products. He doesn't drive emails for any of the products. Only thing he promotes is partner with Anthony. And then the training does all the selling of everything else he's doing. And so what's interesting is like when someone's paying for a membership site through learning,

um, like their guards down, they're not like, Oh, I mean, this is a salesman. I'm on a webinar. He's going to pitch me something. I'm on a five day challenge. Someday they're going to be, he's going to pitch me something. It's like, no, this is a free training course. I'm not selling anything, but here's the tool you need for this. Here's the tool you need for this.

Oh, if you want my templates for this and like the training just recommends resources. And, um, like I said, Anthony, Anthony's brilliant. He's probably one of the richest dudes I know in this market. Um, cause he does really smart things like this, that he doesn't do this customer support or anything. He just drives traffic one thing and it does all the work. So, so he shared that. And again, if you go back, if you guys log in the inner circle members area, that presentation is in there. If you listen to the inner circle members only podcast, it's also in there. That's where I listen to it all the time. Cause I go back to the old inner circle, um, podcast.

I listened to that and a couple other ones that are really, really good. He's getting this. Any questions about it all? You have a question? Do we have a microphone that I can throw at her? Oh, here's tossing me, I'll hand it over. Don't hit your camera. Yeah.

So affiliates is one thing I feel like I've never done. I understand the concept. But I always think of, like, I'm building out a startup in this program. And I want to make sure the product is solid before I launch it to affiliates. I noticed it's like secrets of success. You launched affiliates like right out the gate. And so like challenged my thinking, but like, when's the time when you like start to create an affiliate program and you feel like it's the right time. So me personally, I think it's the first step. I've heard you say that. I'm asking this question

because paid ads are the worst because paid ads is like, anyway, I like think I'd rather get, cause I was thinking about this, like the best traffic in the world is your own hot market, right? Your own list who loves you. Second best are that people may not know you, but they, you have a partnership with somebody who does know you and their audience doesn't, and they can recommend us a warm referral. Like, Hey, me, I created this really cool thing. You should go check it out. Like that's the second best. And then we go to the next phase, which is like, now we're going out to the masses. We don't know who we are. And that's colder traffic. That's paid ads. And so a lot of you guys are going straight to paid ads, which paid ads are harder because you've got to get the copies. It's, it's harder to get copy to convert on ads and like

all those kinds of things. Right. Versus like if I throw up, I can throw up a page tomorrow. That's like, Hey, this is Russell. You guys don't buy this thing. And I click down below. And like, and if I sent it to all of you guys, most of you guys will buy it just because it's like we have an audience right but if i ran the same thing on facebook ads like john would stop running ads in 30 seconds like no one will buy this thing no one's converting you know i mean but we're always trying like everyone's trying to launch with the hardest thing possible where i'm like there's a huge pile of cash right here and what you guys are all doing is like there's a pile of cash i'm gonna step over here i'm gonna step over here i'm gonna come over here and like we're to get this thing to work first.

And then we'll grab that. And you're trying to get the scale and everything. I'm like, wouldn't it have been easier just to like grab this pile of cash and like put it in the bank. And then like there's over here, get partners of cash and grab all that. And you spend a year doing that. Then you take this money now and you come over and now you start running ads over here with some profit. Like that's such an, in my mind, just easier. We did two years of ClickFunnels of just grabbing all this before we had anyone, before John,

before we were sitting in meeting like, we should probably run ads someday. Who wants to learn? And John's like, I'll learn. And that was like two years in the business before we ever ran an ad, but we'd already collected 10, 15, $20 million in profit before we started giving it away, which we need that profit. You know, growing a company when you're focused on paid ads is hard because the profits all getting sucked out by Zuckerberg or whoever versus this is like you're keeping so much more revenue up front before you

anyway that's the product like for you like now you have an audience that knows likes and trusts you and it's all the same vertical you know click funnels zoom voomly or whatever all those are kind of the same market and so it's like they're going to trust you in those same verticals and so like if you have a product that maybe you haven't tested before, that's my... Like info product or software product or what's... It's info, but I'm putting e-commerce tied to it. Does it work? I mean, it's principles I've learned the last 20 years bottled up.

So yeah. I've tested it in micro doses, right? So now I'm launching it. But still, I feel like there's things to test like the night because like affiliates you have to build these relationships and you have to answer all these objections and things and so I'm do you just bottle all that up before you launch it or that's really my experience is most affiliates oh sorry until the end of the story this might answer the part of the question but I told you like I did the webinar to our own list I had the stats.

This person's list has stats. So when I do an affiliate, they don't know who I am most of the time. I'm like, hey, we've run this webinar 12 times. Here's everyone's stats. And you see, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And they're like, oh, cool, I'm in. Like, most affiliates are doing it

because they're trying to figure out how to make, they want, obviously, a good product and stuff like that, but they're more, like, they want a webinar that converts. Or they want an offer that converts. Like, that's more important, typically. So are they doing their own webinars? I'm like, this is like new, the new space that I want to get into. And so I'm going to jump through all my false beliefs, but like you're doing the webinar.

They're just setting up the audience. So they're taking your web. Okay. They're just sending them to your webinar. Yeah. Well, I do. I do one specifically for them. Okay.

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

Yep. Okay. I'm willing to switch my thought. Yeah. But that's the way we've, we've done it. And again, I think it's, I don't know,

starting directly with paid ads. It's like, we've been doing secret success. Like we ran, we launched secret success. We put our list, the affiliates promote it. We collected a million dollars for like two days.

And it's like second million dollars. We took that money to run the ads. And like we've been running ads. We spent way too much money. We still can get ads to work. And I'm like, man, if I were to start with ads, I'm like, this business is dead. I would have given up. We've already collected $2 million from not ads.

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

Thanks. All right, back here. Now we're getting some questions coming in. What's up everybody? This is Russell Brunson. I've got something really cool for you today from my friend Taylor Wells. And Taylor spoke at our last Funnel Hacking Live because I wanted him to share a really cool concept about what he calls the revolving pricing method. And today, he decided to sponsor the podcast to give you guys more access to this super cool strategy

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this is the model you need to add into your funnels. So go over to wealthy consultant.com slash secrets, grab your 70% off deal, and let's start turning your clients into long-term revenue. Again, that's wealthyconsultant.com slash secrets. Do not miss out. Hey, this is Russell Brunson. And I want to jump in really quick to share with you a new assessment I found out that is insanely cool. You guys know I'm obsessed with personality profiles and assessments, but this one is different because not only does it help you understand yourself, but more importantly, especially for us who are entrepreneurs, it helps us understand our employees, our teams, and get people sitting on the right seats in the bus so they can get more stuff done. I just had a chance to interview Patrick Lanchoni talking specifically about this

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Take this test for yourself and for your team. And I promise you it will change the working dynamics amongst everybody and help your company to grow. What do you do when your audience are not marketers? Our niche is our audience is mostly Catholic moms. And so there's lots of influencers or people who have lots of wonderful content about faith and family, but we have limited success with them

when they're trying to sell something to their audience who isn't used to being sold to. And they also are really inexperienced with marketing. And, you know, any of this in our world, we shared a little bit with them and the stuff that we learned at FHL about the sort of sequence of stories and things. We've had limited success with it,

but I would love affiliate marketing to work because I just love relationships over Zuckerberg. But we just cannot get it to scale. You're saying it doesn't work when your customers are being affiliates or when your partners that have audiences are trying to. Yeah. When our partners, when our other like influencers. Okay.

What are those influencers selling? Are they selling anything? Nope. They're just influencers who just influence for fun. Yep. That's so crazy, huh? How do they make their money? They don't, They don't.

They just love hanging out on social media and building community and showing cute pictures of their kids and talking about what they're passionate about. Cool. So is the problem that they can't promote correctly or their people don't buy? Both. Which one's the bigger problem? I mean, their people buy because their people people are also our customers and don't have any problem buying the hard thing is getting them to promote yeah okay and then in the past how have you compensated them uh percentage of sales okay free product

okay so for most of so my experience and this is like uh Alison Prince would be able to speak this way better than me, but like with a lot of times that type of influencer, a lot of them, especially if they don't know affiliate marketing, the percentages are confusing them and they don't understand it. So they don't, they don't, they don't know how to push out of like, 30% doesn't make sense in their head. And so we've done a lot of times in the past as we shifted around, we're paying a CPL or CPL, you know, so Zuckerberg, you're going to spend what,

how much per lead would you spend on Facebook for, opt-in for a webinar, let's say? Well, for our product, our average order value is about $50, and so we try to keep it around $20, $25. Are you selling through a webinar? How do you sell, straight VSL or what? Nope, just to Shopify. Okay, Shopify. Do you have an opt-in?

Like, if the affiliate's promoting, you have an affiliate push to Shopify, you're having to promote anything? Shopify, yeah. Okay. Shopify. Do you have an, uh, an opt-in? Like if the affiliates promoted, you just put it, you have an affiliate push to Shopify. You're having to promote anything. Shopify. Yeah. Okay. So I would do that. I try to figure out like how, what's a way that you can make it really, really like easier for the affiliates. So for example, I might do is like, let's say you do an event with a co-branded event. It could be just a fun, like whatever, have them promote that and say, I'm going to pay you $1 for every single lead that, that registers for our thing. Cause then now it's not like 30% of, I don't know if this makes any sense to me. No one's going to buy whatever. It's just like, I'll pay you a dollar

per lead, which is, I guess if you were to pay Zuckerberg for saving, you're paying three to $5 for leads. Now you're a third of the cost or whatever. And they're freaking out. Cause like, wait, I got somebody to put their email address. You can give me a dollar every single time. And now it's something they can tangibly do. Like if I send a thousand people or 10,000 people, like the numbers now make sense in their head really easily. Okay. And then it's very simple. And then you do something that you jump on it.

You can even just like you guys are in a Facebook live hangout, them introduce you, you talk about a thing, then you push to the Shopify store and you keep 100% of profits. That way they don't have any risk or anything in there. I think any paid up front. Now it's just now in their head, it makes more sense. So whenever I've done affiliates who aren't traditional affiliates who understand it, I usually come back to like try to pay them CPLpl if I pay you cost per lead or sometimes it's cost per click everyone you send every click you send I'll pay you 50 cents like what this is amazing

and I'm like I mean it's like a brick three dollars per click like this is insane you know like they just don't it's a whole different world in fact some of you guys may know Eric beers in the atlas program but he's a he's a traffic broker it's all he does and so he goes these big places and he finds people with huge lists, huge database and stuff, and they don't understand our world at all. And so he'll pay like 5 cents a click. And then he sells them to us for like 25 cents a click. And he's making five X's money. And then I'm like, I'd normally pay a dollar for this. And it's like, it's just arbitrage the whole way through. And so you're going to the level where like you can get people for insanely cheap because they don't understand the value of their traffic.

And so just looking at how do I structure it for that affiliate where it's just like a no-brainer for them, you know? Yeah. That's the funny thing about affiliate marketing is you figure out, because I found there's different tiers of affiliates. Some affiliates, all they care about is just money.

They're just money-obsessed, they don't care what the product is. And those ones are the easiest to deal with because they just want money. As long as your offer converts, they'll promote it. The next one are people more like me who are obsessed, like I want an amazing customer experience that it's it's going to be as long as the customer experience

is the best in the world. Like that's what they care about. They don't care how much money they make, whatever they want to make sure it's going to serve their customers. Like that's number two. And then the third are just people that don't know what they're doing. And so it's like, you just work with them and like figure out what is it you're looking for and you craft it and create it. And then boom, they, you can do some really cool things. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. No worries. Um, you talking about, talking about affiliates and then the delay and click fraud and things like that. Do you have any bridge in the gap between that and affiliates for services? So you're obviously familiar with what we do. I've never entertained affiliates or taking a shot at it because of that risk,

because our service is delayed or it's higher ticket, things like that. Do you have any experience or recommendations for potential how I could roll out an affiliate on an agency side? Yeah. So, um, one of the easy things I've seen people do in the ear situation is, um, there's different ways to get paid, right? Like I'm paying out an hour, it's a hundred percent front end commission. Um, some people pay out recurring where it's like you're getting 40% of the recurring thing. The other one is you pay an upfront CPA. So for example, um, Shopify right now will pay an affiliate like $200, $250 when you get someone signed up for a free trial. And now you get none of the money afterwards,

but just the money up front, uh, for setting it up. So what you could do is create something where it's like a $300 onboarding something and you pay affiliates a hundred percent of that. And that's like, then there's the risk is that, but then afterwards you're onboarding something and you pay affiliates a hundred percent of that. And that's like, then there's the risk is that, but then afterwards you're onboarding a client, then you own the person moving forward for the rest of it. Does that make sense? So like, uh, again, uh, Anthony Morrison, I was talking to his brother's Adrian Morrison. He's Shopify's number one affiliate right now. So they actually pay him like $350 for every free trial he signs up, but he gets nothing

afterwards, just that. So he's able to spend $200, $300 to get a lead and he's just blow, he's Shopify's number one affiliate right now. So the same thing is like how do you create something on the front end that doesn't cost you a lot of money that you could pay so they get the big upfront, even though they know like, Hey, they're going to sign a $10,000 a month contract for next year. If it wouldn't get any of that, because that's when it gets hard because you have your hard costs and all the other things.

I would try to create something on the front and it brings somebody in that then 100% or 50% of whatever that is, you could pay out on the affiliate on that and that's how I would shift it. Does that make sense? Yep. Oh, okay.

So the light's shining, I can barely see it and then, okay, cool. Yeah, that's how I would try to structure something like that even if it's like, yeah, some kind of like front end, like we do a keyword research in the consulting and figure out like something like that that's upfront work, like paint out a lot more on that. And nothing on the continuity side. Cool, thanks.

Yeah. I have another question. So we start an affiliate program, and we do pay them per click, per lead, and then if there's a conversion. But the problem we have is retention. Like, they would send out a promotion and then stop. And so how do we get them to continually promote our product? Yeah. Yeah, affiliates by default, especially good affiliates, are lazy. So that's, we've noticed

like I have to, like if someone agrees to promote something, it's, that's like step one, but it doesn't mean they're actually doing anything. So for us, it's like we write the ads for them, write the copy, we do the stuff and then we have to give them reasons to promote. So that's why I was showing you guys yesterday when I was showing it all the mini, like for secret success, all the little mini dramatic demonstrations during every single month. It's because the affiliates promoted once. They don't want to promote the same thing again so i have to give them a reason to promote so i'm like hey this month we're doing this cool earl nightingale campaign do you want to promote that i'm like oh that's unique that's different yes even though it's selling the same product there's

different campaigns and different things like that and then honestly you have to have an affiliate manager who's in contact like we've got multiple people who run our affiliate program on our team who are like they're talking if it's all time traffic what's working what are you doing right now like what are you looking for and like do you have a promotional schedule like like can you send an email out can we do a social media blast like can we put a uh a link in the ps of your emails but they're they're in constant communication with our top affiliates trying to figure out how we can weave into what they're already doing because they're yeah affiliates are and i'm a really good affiliate like we're all nightmares like we're the hardest people to work

with just because we can make a lot of money we know that so it's coming back and understanding like we got to help them and figure out how to different ways to integrate. That's why I think having an affiliate manager who's full time working with affiliates is like an essential role if you really want to do this well, because they got to be constantly communicating with them, showing the new offer. So this is where our affiliate manager will focus most of the effort on those who are in here.

And in my job as the, as the funnel, but you know, as the person person is I got to keep coming out with new offers. So I'm going to come out with a new secret success offer. And then all the affiliate managers will hit everyone, hey, there's a new offer, secret success, everyone go run it. And then I'll do the next one and it'll come out. So we're putting out new offers to give them new things to promote and to go out there. If you're like an actual affiliate, like in an affiliate network, you sign up for an affiliate network, which basically is a whole bunch of tons of different offers.

What typically happens, you'll be connected with an affiliate manager and they're hitting you know, tons of different offers. Um, what typically happen, you'll be connected with affiliate manager and they're hitting you up a couple of times a day. Like, Hey, there's new offer from this company. Want to try it? Here's an offer from here. And like, they're hitting you up trying to figure out what offers you want to promote, but it's a constant communication with your top affiliates. So, so you're saying have different type of offer or just a spin on the same offer? Both. Yes. And yes. It's like all the.com secrets book funnel and the traffic secrets book funnel on this. But I also have like dramatic demonstration about, um, about this part

of the thing. And so I'm just, we're giving different offers, different webinars. Like we're just putting out different front end things to get them engaged and get them excited about, about whatever we're promoting. Thank you. Yeah. Metro links and cross links are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do

so be alert, be aware and stay safe. Yep. So, uh, And only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert. Be aware. And stay safe. Yep. So if you were to start over as an affiliate, what would you do to do Secrets of Success as an affiliate of your own company? How would I promote as an affiliate? Yeah. We could hold a three-day event on that.

That would be really fun. Yeah, I know. I mean, the reality is I would try to build a list, a segment, a list based on the topic. So I would take my existing audience. I'd be like, Hey, I'm doing this cool thing over here. If you're interested, opt in. And I would segment everybody to like, here's people interested in this topic. And then I would create bonuses to get people. So as an affiliate, the way you see me promote things, like when I promote something as an affiliate, my usually thing, it's like, Hey, this is the offer that they're going to give you, but I'm going to throw in these three bonuses for

me. Like I create a better offer. And that's how I usually win most affiliate competitions is by just figuring out how can I make this offer even more sexy? Like what bonuses can I create with training? What kind of things can I put together? And, um, and I have a sub list and I would just keep sending them stuff based on that. So I remember that in 2015, you did a contest with a Ferrari that Jeff Walker won. Yeah. What do you think about those contests? Are you thinking doing pros and cons? Yeah.

So, so, um, I think I had to show you, I wish we could show you guys, we should let you have an extra affiliate launch. Like let you guys see how we do it. So there's two ways to look at me running an affiliate program.

Number one is I like doing launches. Because launches, first off, you get a lot of cash coming in, a lot of traffic. And it's fun to get people behind something, right? So, for example, in May, Justin, Ben, and I are working on the Think and Grow Rich Challenge. So this is a challenge that's coming up. So we have a whole bunch of affiliates. And we want to create a fun competition amongst affiliates because that gets everyone promoting harder, right? And so we set a date. This is what's happening. And so we have a whole launch calendar with everyone. And we start to create a fun competition amongst affiliates because that gets everyone promoting harder, right? And so we set a date.

This is what's happening. And so we have a whole launch calendar for everyone, and we start contacting affiliates. They come in, and then there's a beginning of a launch. There's an end of a launch. We always give away prizes and things like that. Usually there's like the top 10 get prizes. The top three get a better prize. We make a whole bunch of prizes.

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

right? Like I do the big launch cause it's a big payday, but then launch is over. And I was like, cool. Now we're moved to rolling launch and let's get a person and another person. And like, we're just rolling through as many people to keep, keep traffic and sales coming in. Cool. That makes sense. But yeah, affiliate prizes are great. Um, cool thing about affiliate prizes, like typically if you look at when we're in affiliate launch, the top 10, we almost always include some type of mastermind. And there's a reason here's the strategic evil reason behind it. Cause what happens is like we do the launch, they win the mat, they win the mastermind trip. And then we time the mastermind trip a little bit before the next launch is going to happen. So it happens.

They all come out. We hang out with them. We do a mastermind. We serve them food. We have a good time. Everything's amazing. And then at the affiliate mastermind launch, like, hey, just so you guys know, the next launch is happening next month.

Here's what it is. Now our top 10 affiliates all are there in one spot. We recommit them to the next launch and they roll out the next launch. And so that's a big piece of the strategy. So for our secrets to success, we did the affiliate launch. We did the affiliate launch. And then the prize was we took everyone to Chicago to the Nightingale Conant offices, and we did a full one-day event there. And at the event, we said, hey, the next launch is Think and Grow Rich Challenge.

It's coming up in two months from now. We committed them, got them all scheduled out, and so hopefully those people all promote again. And then for them, the next prize is we're going to Wise, Virginia, Napoleon Hill's house for the next prize. So they want to win that. And it helps push people from, from thing to thing to thing.

Yeah. Cool. Back here. It's so, it's so interesting to me real quick for you. Jump in like, um, 15 years ago when you go to market event,

all we talked about was JVs. It's funny. Cause like here, it's like everyone talks about ads and it's like, this is for a lot of you guys. This is so foreign. It's funny to me. Cause it's like, man, back in the day, this is the only lot of you guys this is so foreign it's funny to me because it's like man back in the day this is the only thing we talked about no one talked about ads or pay-per-click it was just fascinating kind of anyway sorry

no you're good um so i was curious do you think that this works if like your dream client is somebody who wouldn't have a list isn't on the entrepreneur side or anything so like everybody that we go after is the w-2 who just has their inner circle is it worth trying to set up an affiliate program? If we don't really have anybody that would know what a list even it's like, if you pull out the entrepreneur side. For sure. So a couple of things is, is your customers.

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

So the Affiliate Evolution offer is interesting because it's twofold. It's number one, we're going to train beginners and give them a platform to help them train them up. But number two, it's like we're going to use this to go out to all the big affiliates like hey you've put our stuff in the past you want 100 commission cool join the site right now upgrade 100 100 commission and then we get them to promote so when i look at the affiliate program i'm less looking at like banking on my existing customers being the ones who are gonna drive a lot of volume because they're usually not instead i'm like who are the other people in my industry like looking back at dream 100 right who are the people who already have my dream customers on a list like that's what i'm focusing

my affiliate program on initially because again you get one or two of those to promote something that's worth 100 customers who are doing onesie twosie sales you know what i mean so that you're looking at like where to focus the most effort it's definitely on like who are the influencers in your space that you could focus on catering and building out a really good affiliate program for them? Awesome. Thank you. Yep. No worries.

Okay. Is that all it? All right. Now we got one more. Okay. When we finish with a customer, we deliver, they're happy with our service product, if we were to bring them on to you, where do you think would be the best place where to introduce them to you, to help them develop that entrepreneurial side of things?

What do you think? To, hey, you should be purchasing these books. Where? What would be the most seamless? So for everyone, it's going to be different based on what your front-end business is, which is why I needed an affiliate manager. So what I would do is I had Ben Harris talk to you, and he'd ask, what's your business? Who would be the most seamless? Let's do a webinar. Or a lot of times for our team, it's like if someone's got a big enough list, then it's like, hey, let's do a collab webinar.

Russell actually will bring Russell on live. We'll bring on one of our webinar presenters on live. We'll create a whole webinar for you where it's co-branded. And then you can come and be like, hey, I'm doing this cool webinar with ClickFunnels. It's a co-branded thing now. And so it just kind of depends. That's why it's good to have an affiliate manager who's kind of trying to put together these deals with people. Because, again, every affiliate is going to be a little bit different.

And, again, some affiliates today just want cash. Some want a really good experience. Some are looking for stuff. It's just, it's all a personal, it's a personal thing. Yeah. I just want to share that this works. Like six years ago, we were giving $100,000 a month to Zuckerberg and Google combined. And fast forward now, 95% of our business comes from affiliate partners. And just exactly what he was saying, there's those that are just going to send two or three deals in.

They'll just use your automated funnel. But when you have a big player that has a big list, that's where you do that custom webinar. And you do it together with them. Maybe you record it and they put it in their email autoresponder for some of their new clients. And that way you're getting clients in continuously. But that custom webinar, we do that all the time with big partners and that brings in, you know, monster, monster business. Yeah. It's huge. Um, have you guys read the book integration marketing, the Mark Joyner? Um, if you haven't, it's like an hour long read. It's really short, but it's, it's fascinating. So integration marketing is, it's like, how do you, cause like, again, if I get affiliate, if I come to, um, to Dave Lindemann, I'm like, Hey man, we promote my

thing. He's like, yes, it's amazing. So we do a promotion. He promotes that we get a bunch of sales and then it's over and then it's done. Right. So integration marketing is really interesting. It's like finding partners and yes, you want to do the one time sale, but it's like, how do I integrate my business into his business? So that, um, so that even if like after the promotion is done, like it's not over, right? So for example, if I was going back to Dave, I'd be like, Hey, let's do a webinar together. It's gonna be amazing. So we do a webinar together, right? Whatever happens, it converts well. And then we record the whole thing. I said, okay, I'm going to build an evergreen funnel out of the webinar we did

together. So I built an evergreen funnel for him. I'm like, Hey, let's go back to your email sequence. And like, where can we plug this into your email sequence? He's like, well, I have a 12-day email sequence. I'm like, cool. Day 13 through 15, we do three emails. Let's put those in there all pushing this webinar. And that way, the webinar we did once, you'll get paid forever. And then I'm like, what else could we do?

He's like, well, in social media, I've got this or I've got whatever it is. And I'm like, how do I integrate in? How do I put it so that on your thank you page, after somebody opts into your list, I can put a link on the thank you page that pushes now to the webinar we did together. So go back to his offers and plug it in there. And like now all your customers, when they buy a product, you take them to membership site. How do I put like this offer to the member? And so we try to integrate into that person's sales process everywhere we can do. And so for me, when we launched click funnels, Mark Joyner is my first mentor. He had just written integration

marketing. So I was like, how do we start doing this? And so for the last decade, I've been doing this process with our affiliates. Like, do your promotion, and we'll come back and try to weave things into their sequences, their autoresponders, things like that. And we get so much traffic. Again, I told you, more than 50% of our traffic comes from affiliates. And these are not people doing active affiliate promotions most of the time. Usually it's like we set up all these deals five years ago,

and every time they get an opt-in in their funnel, email 13, they're hitting us click funnels. And most times they forget it's even in the sequence. And like, we just keep getting traffic as their companies grow. And so that's the other powerful thing about affiliate marketing. We start looking at that lens. It's just like that every single person, if I can integrate into that person's business, like as their business grows, my business grows. Right. Um, anyway, so that's, that's really the power. I look at, again, our top five affiliates, none of these guys actually pro click funnels, but all of them have some kind of training system

and we're plugged into everyone when their training systems were day three or day 10, they're telling the people that they need a funnel and then they give them a click funnel share funnel and we're the ones plugged in there. And so it's like these people, as their businesses grow, our business grows and it's just like the most beautiful thing in the world to figure out how you can integrate into other people's businesses. Does that help? Yes. Cause then we do that. We spend, spend a year doing that, spend three years doing that. And then you can cut off Zuckerberg. I'm done kind of paid as just retire and everyone else's businesses are growing. Your business grows on the backend because of it, which is awesome. Do you have a question? Yes. I'd love

your opinion on the places that aggregate a whole bunch of affiliates like clickbank.com. Yes. Great question. Um, so I'm a big, again, this is gonna be different for everyone's market. Um, but affiliate networks are nice cause they've aggregated affiliates. So clickbank.com, for example, if you go there, there's a whole marketplace with thousands of products and they have, they, um, uh, and affiliates come and they can promote things. And so what I typically do and what we do all the time, but like if I'm going to a new business, I'll go to ClickBank

and I'll go find the top 20, 30 offers and I sign up for all their affiliate programs. And when you do that, you get on all their lists. And what's typically happening is most of these affiliate programs are doing affiliate launches. And so they'll send out links like, hey, we did our affiliate launch. Here's the top 10 affiliates.

And boom, they show you, here's the top 10 affiliates by name. And guess what you do? You look up their name on Facebook. You become friends with them. You send them a present email. Also, like the top 10 affiliates by name. And guess what you do? You look up their name on Facebook. You become friends with them. You send them a present email. All of a sudden, the top 10 affiliates, you can ask a lot of times people come in. In fact, we had a guy, Secret to Success. He never promoted anything ever.

He promoted, he was like the top two or three affiliate. And he's like, man, I did that one affiliate promotion. He's like, it's so crazy. I felt like 50 people reach out to me to promote their offer. I'm like, yeah, it's because you're on the top 10 list. And so if there's affiliates happening in your, in your business, like join everyone's affiliate program, sign up for them and just start watching what they're doing. Cause typically that's some version that's happening when they're talking about the top 10 affiliates and you start getting

to know who the affiliates are. You know, their affiliate managers. Um, uh, it's all, again, it's just a relationship business. And so I try to get to know the affiliate managers in all the different programs, uh, because they have access to all of their dream affiliates. Right. Um, and a lot of times we've literally had it before where, um, we'll ask the affiliate manager, like, man, you guys are awesome. Like we'll have a good conversation. I'm like, who are you guys? Top affiliates. And they'll literally like, here's all our top affiliates. And they just give this info. I'm like, you just gave me your top affiliates. This is insane. Um, so there's a lot of things like that. Um, uh, in the, in the, like how to make money on the internet world. Um, obviously it's quick thing. There's other ones. There's, there's a whole, there's a whole bunch

of aggregates that have those kinds of things. Um, I'm not sure about other industries if that's, if that's as applicable, but if you can find it, um, it's a big part of it. Great question. Any other affiliate questions back here? Well, I agree. The question I have is like, you're talking about the integration marketing by that psychology, like how much, is there any special thinking that you do within a, uh, uh, affiliate contest launch? Like, like for example, I'm thinking of like a Bridger and Mason's gamification for their events and stuff like that to sell tickets. Are you doing anything like that with how you promote your, uh, affiliate launches with like the, the rewards inside of what comes in the

contest? Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Um, if you look on the back end, there's some people who are better than others. Like again, I'm signed to everyone's affiliate launch. I'm always watching it. Um, the ones that can, they'm signed to everyone's affiliate launch. So I'm always watching it. Um, the ones that can, they can do the gamification is big deal where they're always doing prizes. Like there's a weekend prize. There's a Thursday. Who gets the most sales today?

Where we get the most often say like you'll get Dean. Dean does a great job. That's when all Dean and Tony launches where it's like, all right, this weekend we're doing a leads contest. We're getting the most leads. We're sending you an iPad. Who gets the most leads?

You're going to get this. And so everyone's fighting for leads. And the next day it's like, there's another thing. And like, and they're competing. And then every day it's like like talking trash being number two and number three and number one and like it's this whole like trash talking game and it's it's competitive and it's fun and like the best the best launches have a lot of those kind of things a lot of gamification amongst the affiliates in there um and again

that's why you should join everyone's everyone's affiliate launches like if you guys how many guys are affiliates of Dean and Tony's? Okay. How many of you guys are affiliates of Stu McLaren? Okay. Like both these programs are launching in the next like 30 days. Like go and join it, get in their Facebook group and just watch and just like, just look at the games that are happening behind the scenes.

Cause, um, they're both really, really good at what they're doing. If you're like, I don't know how to get to Stu's affiliate program. I don't know. Go to go type in Stu McLaren product launch or whatever his name is, course launch. And anytime you see the launch happening, people are promoting stuff, search for the product name and like, JV, affiliate, go to the Facebook. You're using it as a Facebook group for almost every affiliate launch

where all the affiliates are in there together. They're talking and hanging out. And just start looking for those things and start plugging yourself in because that's when you start. That's when you'll see this happening. You'll see the games. you can model for what you're doing. Plus again, you can start stealing their affiliates and building relationships with the top people and that kind of stuff. So, I mean, meeting their top affiliates. Yeah. So good

questions. Okay. Uh, any more before that? Two more things. And all right. right. I'll think about that. I'll think about putting together something. It's actually funny. Stu McLaren and I, man, almost, probably close to 20 years ago now. When we first met, Stu was the affiliate manager for Dan Kennedy's business. Armand Morins and Alex Mdoja, he was the affiliate manager for all these guys. And I had my own affiliate program back then. I think I had 38,000 affiliates for my program way back 20 years ago.

And so we came together and we did an event called Affiliate Inferno, which taught people how to run and launch their own affiliate program. And it was like we did a three or four day event. It was really, really cool. But I haven't really talked about that kind of stuff for a long time. So I'll look at putting together something for you guys that could be, um, more like a, like a more complete thing to really help. Cause I think, um, again, my whole goal in life is how do I like all the things I can do right now to decrease my dependence on Mark Zuckerberg, um, the better. And so like everything, um, that's, that's my number one goal right now. It's everything. Um, and so this is such a big focus for what we're doing, all these other things we're doing,

um, just to focus more affiliates, um, advertising networks, everything that's not related to those guys. And so I think for all of you guys, just to protect yourselves for future, like understanding affiliate marketing and being able to build that part of your business is, I don't know, I think it's detrimental. If you read the Traffic Secrets book, like the intro is like, if you read the intro, it's like there's a storm coming. And I was talking about this, like right now, when I'm writing this, Facebook's the greatest thing in the world. We all love it. But the storm's coming. I promise you like right now, like I feel like we're in that it's getting harder and harder and it's not going to get easier. Um, and so now's the time to really start focusing on these other alternative methods. Um, that are powerful.