Matt McWilliams: The first one, I don't need an affiliate program.
All right. That's a big lie. Probably about five or six years ago. I met this guy. I'm going to call him Joe. And I've always given this guy out. When I told this story, I have to give him a fake name because you've heard of him. All right. He's delivered a mainstage Ted talk, not a TEDx, but a mainstage Ted talk.
He's written multiple bestselling books, had a decent email list. By all accounts, he was making it. And when I went to him and said, you need an affiliate program. This is how you're going to take your business from 20, 25 million to a hundred million plus. He's I don't need a face, but I don't need a Facebook.
Or I don't need a an affiliate program. I was like, I can do everything I want on Facebook. I get all my leads from Facebook. And I'm like, the irony is dude, you were telling people his business. Empire was built in part by telling people to diversify their incomes through investing and real estate, things like that.
And yet he was putting all of his marketing eggs into the Facebook basket. I was like, dude, have you ever heard of my space? Imagine you put all your eggs in that basket in 2007 and then 2009 happened. Now, thankfully he had a CMO who's a pretty smart dude. And this guy was like, you got to start an affiliate program.
He is not listening. Four months after I talked to him, Facebook shut his account down for an entire week, no new leads, no sales business, completely shut down for a week. Basically when they finally got their account back, their cost had more than doubled. Their conversions had been cut in half.
They went from like a 80 percent profit margin down to a sub 10 percent profit margin. And Misty says, her account got shut down for six and a half months, six and a half months. It could be LinkedIn. It could be Facebook. It could be Instagram. It doesn't matter. If you put all your eggs in one basket.
You're eventually going to fail. So their next call was to me. And as you can imagine, I charged him a lot of money because desperate. And here's the thing. This is not unusual. This lie tells you, you can do everything you want in your business alone. No help from anyone. You can reach everyone on earth through Facebook, Google, maybe LinkedIn, right?
I know those platforms are huge. Facebook has 1. 2 billion users. But I'm telling you, you're missing out on all those benefits that we just talked about earlier, the scalability, no risk because you make money before you spend it, the easy targeting. If I can just go off script here, this, something just happened the other day.
I had a call her a client also a friend, but she's in her mastermind. And she was like, I asked, I was asked for wins at the beginning of the mastermind meeting what are, let's take five minutes and I'll share wins. She's I finished my Facebook page. I don't know. I was in one of those kinds of moods.
I was like, why is that a win? She's I'd spent I spent like 20 hours on that thing. And it took me like four hours the other day to finish it. And I said, why are you fiddling with Facebook? And I went on to tell her, I was like, when you spend 20 hours on your Facebook page instead of spending 20 hours growing your affiliate program, it's I've told her a hundred times to focus on her affiliate program.
I said, do you realize the reach on a Facebook page is one or two percent? I said, how many people do you have following you on Facebook? She's 136. Thank you very much. I was like, that means that when you post something, you're reaching two. Maybe four people. You literally could reach 10 times that without any effort.
40 people by going to get one good affiliate. And that's one small affiliate. I just thought stop fiddling with Facebook. Simply put when you don't have. an affiliate program, you put a very low ceiling on your growth. Now, wrapped up in this lie is another underlying belief that my niche won't support an affiliate program.
It's, it just, my niche just is not going to support an affiliate program. Years ago I had lunch with a guy named Eric Andreas. And Eric is an online guitar instructor. And we first met, he flat out told me affiliate programs don't work in my niche. And then I showed him the numbers from learning master guitar, which I ran.
And we had done more than 4 million in affiliate sales the year before. And his mind changed. So he started an affiliate program and he, we talked about a year later and he's dude, I went from 88, 000 to over 200, 000 in revenue. And I was like, man, that's awesome. And he's no. You don't understand what that means.
He's we moved out of that crappy apartment into a nice three bedroom house and a neighborhood that I know because I grew up in that vicinity. And so I knew exactly what he was talking about. And he's this daughter who is mildly special needs, they put her in a new school that they couldn't have afforded before.
And all these things, paid off all their debt except for their house and all these things. And he was like, dude, this completely changed my life. But it came from that belief initially that he didn't even think his his niche would support an affiliate program. Every single niche will support an affiliate program.
Trust me. There's a reason why it works in B2B. There's a reason why Walmart and target and Amazon and Apple have affiliate programs, why Shutterfly has a why we've worked with dozens of male clients and female clients, why we work in the parenting niche and the internet marketing niche, the software niche, you name a niche.
I've probably run an affiliate program in it. And if I haven't, I guarantee you there's at least three affiliate programs in that niche. It works in every niche. So this lie that I don't need affiliate program, it's simply not true. It's simply not true. This lie is flat out busted. Now, if you're thinking you need to hire someone, That's the big obstacle.
Don't worry. Later on, I'm going to show you why you do not need. In fact, why you should not even hire an affiliate manager. All right. I run affiliate programs for a living. I don't think you should hire me. It's weird. I don't think you should hire anyone when you're starting an affiliate program.
All right. So I'm going to talk about that later.
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