Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the gile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric: And today we're gonna talk about affiliate marketing made simple, when we give you a step by step guide on how to make it work. So Neil, first and foremost, affiliate marketing has a bad rap right? You can call it performance marketing, whatever, but what is affiliate marketing first and why does it have a bad rap?

Neil: Affiliate marketing is performance based marketing. Typically as a business, you pay for traffic, whether it's Google adverts, Facebook ads, even SEO. It takes time and energy and time costs money. What affiliate marketing is, is someone says, "Hey, I can drive you leads or sales. You're already doing marketing, you're already spending money. If you're making $500 every time someone purchases something or becomes a lead in profit, how about I just charge you $100 every time I drive you a lead or a sale?" So it's performance based. The reason affiliate marketing has a bad rap, is these affiliates in some cases, not all, are really aggressive. They'll lie, they'll deceit people, they'll take ads that are really aggressive and put things that you don't offer in there, just so they can get a sale. For example, they may end up putting in the ad saying, "We'll include things like 24 hour support, we'll do things like give you a free giveaway or enter you into win a car."
Or they may even do things like bid on your brand terms on Google, and just take away sales from you that you should have had without paying them.

Eric: Yeah, so the easiest way to get started is, there's a lot to cover but we can only do so much in a short podcast episode, so I recommend reading a book by, I believe it's Gino ... I forgot what his last name is, but if you go to Amazon, search affiliate marketing a day. I think it's ... If you literally just search affiliate marketing a day, I think it's affiliate marketing ... I think it's an hour a day or something like that, you'll be able to find it, and it's a really comprehensive guide on what you need to do and what you need to watch out for when it comes to affiliates. Now, what I think is important is, you gotta have the right terms, because like Neil has mentioned, there's a lot of bad actors in this space where all they do is ... They just care about money, they're gonna try to game it however they can to make a buck. Whether it's bidding on your terms or doing some kind of [inaudible 00:02:31] stuff, or doing stuff that maybe putting your brand in front of ... Maybe putting it on a porn website for example.
You don't wanna be reflected that way. So you have to have really strict terms and you have to actually have someone managing it. So it's important to have an affiliate manager, it is basically ... It's not a part-time job, you gotta have someone focus on it. If you can't do that, I recommend not doing it. But I do like the concept of having an affiliate program because, if you look at a lot of companies out there, a mutual friend of ours ... Actually two mutual friends of ours, one is a super affiliate for WordPress, the other guy, his company, 80% of his revenue is driven from affiliates. So if you can find the right affiliates, that are relevant to you. They have the right traffic and you have the right offer, it's a great marriage and it's gonna help you scale your business faster. Now before I turn it back over to Neil, there are a couple of tools that you can use. There's one called Tapfiliate and I believe that one is ... I was talking to my partner for our SAS product and then he was mentioning that this one is 90% cheaper than the other solutions.
So Tapfiliate is one of them. Then you have HasOffers, which is well known in the space. I don't think it's called HasOffers anymore. And then you have Getambassador. Getambassador is a guy in this mutual entrepreneur group, you can check out that one. Is it called TUNE?

Neil: No, TUNE is a parent company. HasOffers still exists.

Eric: Got it, okay. Neil.

Neil: With affiliate marketing, what most people get wrong is, they think if you just do affiliates because you're paying for performance, you're gonna make more sales. A lot of these affiliates won't do well for you unless your funnel is fine tuned. So make sure you're running tests, you're looking at your funnel and Google and see where the drop off is and fix it. But the best way to make money from affiliate marketing as a business, you need to go out there and recruit. So look at a company called Convertkit, they do an amazing job at this. And they're like, "Oh, you mentioned Aweber, oh you mentioned Campaign Monitor. I usually just offer Convertkit at the same time too, because here's why we're different, here's why we're amazing. And plus, if you link to us and you drive a sale, you'll make money."
But what they do that's extremely well, and this is how they generate most of their affiliate sales, they go and reach out to their ideal customer, or blogs that have their ideal customer. They do joint webinars. By doing a joint webinar, that showcases how your product or service can solve a problem for all those blog readers, that is how you'll generate the most sales. Not just because someone's [inaudible 00:04:52] your product, but because you're educating first. When you educate people on how your product or service can help them, and then you offer them a really good deal for signing up right then and there, the conversions go through the roof. But there's two keys with that, and I'm gonna state this over again. One is education, two is offering a deal. If you don't have both of them, the webinars don't convert well. And I can't emphasize that deal has to be good enough for whenever they search any other site, they're not gonna get it.

Eric: Yeah, and affiliates ... We're talking about this in the contexts of software where it's very easy to [inaudible 00:05:25] tracking links and things like that, but you can also even do this with a service based business too. And Neil and I was just talking about a company yesterday, that did about $88,000,000 in revenue in 2016, and all they do is performance marketing, which is affiliate marketing. And they make it work, and it scales really well for them, they're very experienced in this space. But sometimes, let's say you're an agency, you might have a client or two where you just know you're crushing them for whatever you do is gonna turn into gold. Maybe it might be worth putting together an affiliate program and then being paid on performance. Now, some of you might be saying, "Well that's really risky initially."
I have another friend that works on a performance basis. What he does, and this is for you agency people out there, what he does is he tells the client, a new client, he'll say, "Hey, why don't you put together ... You put $10,000 down first and then we'll run the ad for a month. So you're showing that you're serious, and we'll run the ads and we'll see how the data is in the first month or so." So it could be 5,000 $10,000 whatever. And then if the numbers look good, then you say, "Okay, the numbers look good, we'll start to put money on our own in. You've put up your end of the bargain and then we'll just run things from there." But again, you have to make sure that you have your things, your tracking buttoned up, you have your terms buttoned up. Ideally you understand affiliate marketing, at least at a cursory level so you don't lose your shirt. And then down the road you have an affiliate manager to help you.

Neil: Last tip from me is, when you're paying out your affiliates, don't do not 30, do something like net 60, it will give you time for the chargebacks and refunds. I see a lot of people paying out too fast, this is where you can lose your shirt, get screwed over. Seriously don't do anything less than net 60.

Eric: Great, so that's it for today. But go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to get marketing tools to grow your business, and we'll see you tomorrow.

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