I just finished watching (actually listening to the MP3 version) of the video conversation between Jeff Walker, Eben Pagan and Frank Kern. The video is one of the resources Jeff released free from his “road trip” around the USA interviewing marketers who have done big online launches.
If you haven’t seen any of the videos, head to the product launch formula website and enter your name and email to gain access to the video and MP3 interview with Jeff, Eben and Frank. It’s free and Jeff’s stays on topic when he sends mail, so you won’t get hit with pitch after pitch once you are on his list.
If you haven’t watched the first video from Jeff where he interviews John who makes $9,000 a month from a business selling a board game about medicinal herbs (!) – you can find that video and the full story in my previous post here -
$9,000 a month from a board game
I won’t recount the entire video with Jeff, Frank and Eben but there was one point they brought up I wanted to discuss further because it’s something that is often overlooked by people doing a launch. These techniques are part of what Jeff claims are new to the 2.0 version of the Product Launch Formula and it’s safe to say no one else is looking at this to the depth Jeff is.
What are we talking about? Your affiliates – in particular, how to motivate them to promote your product.
The Greatest Source of Traffic Is…
Most of us poor bloggers have a mentality akin to the working class when it comes to building traffic. We toil day-in and day-out, pumping out content, building little channels of traffic and slowly creating an asset. We hope to retire one day leveraging our years of previous effort and follow the slow-and-steady path to success.
That’s a fine way to go about building an Internet business – that’s exactly how I did it and in time, it can be very rewarding – BUT, there are others who don’t have the patience to go through the slow process of content production and marketing, and instead look for quicker ways to reach an audience.
Marketers who have released products online understand that their affiliates, in most cases, drive traffic and sales. Affiliates are definitely an integral part of a launch process because they help bring in traffic, usually much more traffic and better quality traffic than any other source available online today.
As an avid student of how to build traffic online and also a teacher attempting to offer my students the quickest methods to deliver traffic results (since you are all so impatient!), I’ve studied information products about traffic generation and watched with interest how people market things on the world wide web.
Whenever I purchase an Information product related to making money online, the first page I turn to is the one about how the person built an audience. I have to know how exactly they attracted the traffic necessary to generate sales. In most cases, this is where the real nuggets of value come from and where the real gains can be made if you apply the advice to your business.
After years of research, study and practice, it’s pretty clear that almost every marketing expert agrees that your affiliates are the greatest source of traffic you have. You can look deeper into this and qualify the difference between joint ventures, host beneficiaries and plain old affiliate traffic (each source of traffic is of different quality), but that’s not something we will look at in this article. What’s important is if you want to succeed online today, you need to understand how to leverage affiliates.
It’s Not As Easy As You Think
Most beginners to product launches consider the first step, locating and convincing affiliates to promote for them, the hardest part. As Jeff noted in the video, this is not actually true, the real skill and where the real gains are made, is convincing your affiliates to promote for you more than once.
If it’s difficult to capture the attention of your potential customers, it’s even harder to do so from your affiliates. The true power affiliates are darn busy because they run successful businesses. Your affiliates have done the hard work, they have built targeted lists of customers and formed relationships with these people. All they have to do to make sales during your launch is send an email or, as you want them to do, send several emails (or do multiple blog posts) to promote your product.
How To Motivate Affiliates
Jeff will no doubt go into much more detail about how to motivate affiliates in his coaching program when it is released soon, but since I’m an affiliate of his, I experience his methodology as he implements it for his own launch – and lucky you, as a reader of mine, you get the benefit of this experience as I relate it to you now.
To loosely quote Jeff – not only are you attempting to build buzz in the market of your prospects, you want to also create excitement from your affiliates. Effectively, you use product launch principles on two groups of people (and two different email lists), your prospects and your affiliates.
Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned from Jeff about how to motivate affiliates.
1. It helps if the leaders in your market are working together in a syndicate of mutual benefit.
The top Internet marketing “gurus” have often been accused of forming an “insiders club”, promoting each other’s products in a you scratch my back, I scratch yours process. And yes, this is exactly what goes on. This angers some people, especially those not in the club, but you have to realize that entry is based on merit – you only get the benefit when you can return a similar benefit to others using your traffic assets.
In reality, most markets online don’t have an insiders club…yet and the leaders are usually too scared of each other to work together. The prevalent thinking is scarcity and competition, rather than abundance and collaboration. Everyone can benefit if they work together.
The key here is to create your own syndicate of mutual benefit. Find the top marketers of complimentary products in your industry, promote their products to your readers and they will feel obliged to do the same for you. Do this over time through multiple launches and everyone rises together.
2. Make it copy-and-paste easy
As simple as writing an email and clicking send is, due to limited time and attention, you must provide affiliates with a copy-and-paste solution for sending promotions. They need to be able to grab the email you provide for them, stick it into their email autoresponder (I recommend AWeber) and click send and then watch the money come in.
The best marketers will send personal messages tailored to their audience, but it helps to make it easy to encourage maximum promotion. This is even more important when you consider how many things are clamoring for attention from your affiliates.
3. Use buzz tools like competitions to motivate affiliates
This is not really something new, but recently I’ve begun to personally feel the power of this technique. The big launches give away prizes to the top affiliates and nowadays the prizes are getting better and better and going to more and more people.
For Jeff’s current launch for example, prizes go all the way down to the top 20 affiliates and they are pretty compelling rewards. We are talking video game arcades, macbook pros and airs, plasma TVs, Nintendo Wii, iPods and more.
If you read my blog, you know what the 80/20 rule is (if not, read this – What Is The 80/20 Rule And Why It Will Change Your Life). The same rule applies to affiliates, so naturally your top affiliates account for the most sales (something around the top 20% providing 80% of sales), so naturally you spend your time encouraging this group, hence the prizes on offer.
The top affiliates know each other well and while they don’t really need the toys that are up for grabs (most of them have the money to buy the prizes if they wanted to), it’s the status of beating their friends and winning the competition that motivates them. As a result, they promote more than once.
If you ever wondered why you are on the receiving end of so many emails promoting product launches in the Internet marketing world, it’s not just for the affiliate commission, it’s also for glory in the JV competition.
4. Provide superior free resources as affiliate promo tools and do it often
Nowadays the best and biggest launches provide free reports, videos, teleseminars, audio interviews, launch blogs and of course, email. Each resource you give to affiliates to use as promotional content gives them yet another reason to mail or write for you. If you don’t provide the tools, they won’t promote your launch.
In the “old” days, just one good free report was enough, and in most niches online that probably still holds true. In our lovely saturated niche of Internet market, the bar tends to rise higher and higher with each launch (and this will be the same in other niches as their markets mature), to the point where affiliates enjoy multiple high quality resources that they can pick and choose to promote based on what they anticipate their audience will respond best to.
If you want affiliates to promote your product more than once, give them a reason and the tools to do so.
What You Are Reading Now Is Proof of Concept
I have a confession to make. I’m currently in 15th place in the joint venture competition for Jeff’s launch (the only pure blogger in the list I’m proud to say).
The article you just read is proof of the techniques Jeff teaches. I probably would have written this article anyway since I believe the information is valuable and watching the video stimulated the ideas in me that I wanted to pass on to you. I always consider my relationship with you, my reader, as my primary concern, but let’s not forget that I’m also helping Jeff with his launch – and this is the second time I have done so (so far).
Obviously I’m potentially helping myself too with affiliate commissions later on and I might even rise higher in the JV standings if you decide to participate in Jeff’s launch by signing up to his email list and getting all the free stuff, but I’m not writing this article just for that reason. I want you to see the psychology and the methodology at play here and apply it to your own launches.
By posting a second article to this blog that indirectly promotes Jeff’s launch (the first was the $9,000 board game video), he has motivated me as an affiliate to go beyond the single promotion. I respect Jeff, I think his training is great and I want to cement a relationship with him so he will promote my products in return (and thus further enter the Internet marketing “syndicate”). Clearly there are a lot of motivations at play here, but when done right, it’s win-win-win for everyone involved.
Most of you can’t afford or choose not to buy the big ticket information products like Product Launch Formula, and that’s fine. However, if nothing else, learn by observation, especially if you are not in a position to invest money in your education (yet).
You can do this right now by watching the videos from Jeff, seeing what resources he gives away, what media he uses to deliver information, how he motivates his affiliates and how he writes emails. Here’s the link for the latest video that sparked the ideas for this article you just finished reading and there’s plenty more good ideas in the video if you have the patience to watch or listen to it all the way through -
If you want the full video, you know what you have to do 
.
Yaro Starak
15th Place
Yaro I have to admire and thank you for being so open and honest in this post. I have seen people promoting PLF all over the place in the last week or two but you are the only person who has explained what is happening in the affiliate side of things.
This really interests me because I find myself in the unique position of being really excited about PLF as both a potential buyer and as a (I hope) future affiliate.
Yaro, interesting comments here.
I know you to be a top blogger, so it’s comforting to hear that you went through
the same process I’m currently experience
of building my blog asset.
The rest of the post was good, too
Now, if only Caroline would return my emails!
LOL
Thanks,
Dan
P.S. The asset I’m building is here
http://danielmcgonagle.name
This post was featured in today’s Daily Blog Summary–a daily summary of the top 50 Make Money Blogging blogs.
hey yaro…i have been following jeff’s product launch, and it is awesome…i am glad to hear about it from you..the videos and interviews are amazing!
thanks,
timothy..
http://www.timothyadamdesigns.com/
A very well explained post as always. Like Caroline I have seen this advertised all over the post and have to say the videos and techniques used to build hype are working well on me. However very few provide the value that you seem to, especially for the newbies – it’s good to remember we were (and still are) new to areas too. This is certainly something outside of my expertise and very interesting to look at.
Thanks as usual you provide quality informaiton that is so valuable. Cheers!
Also the “teasing” aspect of this launch is particulary well done I have to say.
There are some contradictions in here between competition and collaboration. Well worth exploring.
Jeff’s mini-case-studies don’t give any details about his (earlier version) of product launch formula. I wouldn’t bother watching them; they are mostly people following the formula and saying they succeeded + saying doing it this way didn’t hurt their list any.
Jeff talks about people just using the free stuff he provides to do a launch. There isn’t nearly enough detail in the free stuff – for me anyway, but I’m quite new to all this.
Jeff also talks to people who already had fairly large lists. No information on how to build one. This is the major problem for me as I’m just starting out. It may be great when I have a thousand or so subscribers, but not for now.
Jeff does provide information though, it’s not just hype. I’m not saying that the stuff isn’t excellent or that it doesn’t work. Just that it doesn’t have much to say to those of us just starting (a downside of the cartel model – oops I mean leader working together: it excludes those just starting. And means that, like Yaro, we have to take the slow and steady way.)
Another great post Yaro,
I agree with what Evan has to say about Jeff’s products, at the moment I am staying neutral, and observing what is happening. I have a homestudy course ready to make into reality, but as I only have a list of 125 subscribers, I feel that I need at least 1,000 subscribers for the PLF to be effective. I would love to hear from any body that has a small list and used PLF with success
Regards
Mark.
Thanks Yaro – you have covered what seems to be my blindspot at the moment. I intend to launch a new product mid-year so this information is very timely and helpful.
Hi Yaro,
I’ve actually been following Jeff’s videos and posts very closely because the Speed Launch Contest he’s doing caught my attention and I decide to try to win so I can get a Macbook, free copy of PLF and also coaching from Jeff.
I don’t know if I’ll win but I can tell you I definitely have sped through setting up a product that would have probably taken me at least a month (or more) to get set up if I had just taken my time.
I couldn’t agree with you more on how important an affiliate program is and motivating affiliates. I have many clients who think of their affiliate program as an afterthought and don’t really realize the power of having excited affiliates out there working for your business.
Thanks for the post!
Angela Wills
In response to Evan’s comments – I have to admit that I felt capable of conducting a product launch without buying Jeff’s 1.0 homestudy version of PLF, but only because I had many years experience online and closely watched many launches. I became familiar simply by observing and experiencing.
I did eventually buy PLF for several reasons -
- to fill any gaps in my knowledge
- to find out exactly how Jeff recommends recruiting affiliates
- to explore further how Jeff recommends building a list
- and most importantly but perhaps the most overlooked reason, to get the attention of Jeff.
As a client of a person you immediately command more attention from them, which is one of the main reasons I buy products. That’s also one of the ways to secure top JVs – buy their products and put them to use. As someone who sells a training program I love it when a person comes up to me with a story to tell of success from following what I teach and am most welcome to discuss a possible JV with them as a result.
Evan and others like him – I think you just need to explore further all of the elements that go into Internet marketing, especially list building if that is the area you feel most frustrated with, and above all else, put into action what you learn so you can see for yourself.
Until you experience a product launch you will forever be skeptical and some things you just can’t learn in any information product, which is why you might feel that some products don’t give you all the answers you want – it’s impossible to, you have to find them out for yourself.
In terms of how to build a list, Evan, you are a Blog Mastermind student so you know how I do it. I attracted 3000 subscribers in the first year of building a list. Before that it took a year of solid blogging to build up the traffic that eventually fed the list.
That’s a slow way to go about it, but it works – I’m proof of this and there’s plenty more bloggers in other markets building lists – I know because some of the other Blog Mastermind students are doing it right now.
Jeff talks about list building via Pay Per Click and blogging – in fact I wrote a blog post that detailed one such system he explained in a podcast he sent to his subscribers. You can read about it in this post – How To Launch A Niche Blogging Business.
This is my first trip to this blog, got here from the “Networking Effectively” blog, which was my first time there.
I have thought that an “insider’s club” existed with a mutual “back-scratching” going on, but you make a great observation that gaining entry does require a win-win arrangement for everyone.
Thanks, Yaro.
Not sure what your responding to.
It may be that I won’t know about a launch util I do one. I think this is true. This I’m sure is your experience. And from what I know of the experience of others it seems very true.
However Jeff is promoting a product that claims to be a formula, that emphasises that if you follow what he says to do then you will be successful. My argument is not with you but this approach of Jeff’s. (You seem to have the same problem as me.)
As to the slow and steady approach. As I say this is what I’m adopting. It was you who raised in this post the point that others don’t have the patience to go this slow route.
I really don’t think it insignificant that all the people Jeff speaks to already have big lists. For those of us starting out this is a major difference.
Finally, I made the point that Jeff’s stuff does actually have content, which distinguishes him (along with such people as yourself and Caroline Middlebrook) from the great majority of the internet marketers out there.
Hi Yaro
Thank you for yet another terrific post.
I seem to be on everyone and their grandmothers mailing list (which is entirely my own fault of course!). So, in an attempt to reduce the amount of information popping into my inbox, I’ve unsubscribed from 95% of them over the past month of so. Your’s is one of the 5% that I keep because you seem to be an expert in your field and the information you impart is very insightful and actionable. To anyone who reads my post…No! Yaro has definitely not paid me to say this. I just believe in giving credit to someone when they deserve it.
Anyway…moving swiftly on…
I started an affiliate program for my blog a couple of months ago. To date, I’ve only got 3 affiliates. I produce all of the content for the blog myself and there just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day to spend time attracting affiliates. To be honest, I don’t know how to do affiliate promotion for my site. I realise from your post that having an army of affiliates is a tremendously powerful way of expanding my visibility and I need to make time to motivate the few affiliates that I do have.
I would appreciate any advice you could give me here.
John O’Hara
An excellent post, Yaro. You broke down some of the most important points of internet marketing here. It’s great information for us newbies, but I think some of the old timers (we have those, right?) could benefit from your fresh and honest perspective as well.
The “slow and steady” approach can be a little unnerving at times, but I think that’s one of the things that will eventually make an internet marketer successful, if for no other reason than because most other marketers give up and go back to their desk jobs.
Well done!
Yaro this is a very good informative blog post. I am a beginner type affiliate marketer and it is really not easy. I will use some of the tips here in my SEO arsenal. Thanks for the info.
As someone who is really very new to the world of blogging and affiliate marketing I just want to thank you for this and some other wonderful articles I have found on your site.
Very helpful.
Most people that jump right to the top, fall back to the bottom. You need to earn your key.
Nice article thanks for the great tips on getting the affiliates to help in the promoting process
Gotta move quick… busy times right now.
Yaro – cool article.
Evan – wait until you see my next video. HINT: do you consider 17 people a big list”
- Jeff
Hi Jeff,
If it’s the one of you presenting at Rich Schefren’s gig I watched it this morning. (As Jeff says skip to minute 42.)
I’ll be one of those following your free advice – as you suggest. At the moment I don’t have a list – though I do have subscribers to my blog.
At the moment I’m doing a couple of free ebooks – the first to promote my blog and the second to promote a membership course. I will be taking your advice in the talk you gave at Rich Schefren’s gig: to start with a few and then use them to endorse it and build from there. I do think this is good advice.
As you, and others, can see I have subscribed to your email list. Unfortunately on my current income (which I hope to increase hugely through blogging) I won’t be able to afford your course.
Ummmm… I definitely did NOT say to skip to minute 42.
I said no matter what, don’t miss the stuff that starts at minute 42.
Yaro,
Great thoughts about motivating affiliates to promote for you. In addition to being a strong traffic source, affiliates can also be a free SEO team, depending on how the affiliate program is configured. Best of the Web is a good example of this, as they use referrer tracking, which allows their affiliates to place SEO friendly links to their site. Even still, for these benefits to be realized, you need motivated affiliates placing links for you.
I almost never watch videos that I see embedded in blogs, especially not when they’re this long, but I will definitely be watching this one when I get home tonight.
You had me hooked when you said, “$9,000 a month from a business selling a board game about medicinal herbs”. And here I thought I was pretty cool when I made a few hundred from a mini-site on man-boobs.
It is great how you gave us a step by step / instructions on motivating affiliates … sometimes it takes proper guidance to do these kind of things!
I never had success with affiliate. you can see i run ebay products on my blog. but never got a sale since 1 month.
I think i will have to follow this article. Thanks man
Another Tips from Yaro, Well i hope i can work with that suggestion?