Matt McWilliams: Let's talk about the how to the tactics. The single most important thing here is to make sure that you first Build the relationship. You cannot go into this asking someone to marry you on the first date. One of my favorite quotes of all time from Jeffrey Ginnemer, he says, all things being equal, people want to do business with their friends.
And guess what? When all things aren't equal. People still want to do business with their friends. You know this, right? Don't you want to do business with your friends? Haven't you bought something that was more expensive or harder to get because it was with your friend? I cannot stress this enough.
Build the relationship. Now, from a tactical perspective, here are two keys. Number one, use various methods. To reach out, use email, use physical mail, use text, use social media, use everything. I mentioned physical mail in there. I always start with email because email is free and easy.
But if I have 200 people that I want to reach out to and only 30 of them replied to the email, I then move on to social media and I'll hear from another 30 and then I'll usually go from there to physical mail to some of the top ones. If they have a big enough audience. And it costs you 20 or 30 bucks to send them physical mail.
I say to him, you're like, why would it cost 20 or 30? If I get like a form letter in the mail, I don't open it. But if I get lumpy mail from FedEx, I open it. So be willing to make that investment. So number one, use various methods. Don't just stick to email. They didn't respond to my email or my DM. Cool.
Try everything else. Under the sun that you can find. And when you do make sure to keep your initial contact short, this is going to sound completely counterintuitive. Your goal, when you reach out to perspective affiliates is not to get a yes response. It's weird, right? Your goal is not to get a yes response.
Your goal is not to share everything with them. Let me ask you guys, what do you guys do
when you get a long email from somebody you don't know and it just drags on and on and there's like a handful of links? What do you do with that email?
You delete it. You delete it. Because it's long and nobody reads long emails from people they don't know. Your goal... It's simply to inspire enough curiosity that they write back with three simple words. They write back and say, tell me more. Those are, I love more information or I'm interested. Those are the three sweetest words you can read or hear that starts a conversation.
And that when they say, tell me more, that's an invitation to write back and share more information about your company and your product and your affiliate program. Here's the thing. Do not try to put a lot of information in that initial reach out. They will never read it. They will never read it. So keep it short and sweet.
And just to be clear, yes, it is that simple. All right. So I've shared four quick ways. I saw Shahan's question. What's the best way to find a, what is it? Affiliates for, digital books and courses. Same way. Shahan, I'll give you this real quick for books. I'm going to answer his question cause you'll get some ideas for this.
If you're on stuff, I call it the Amazon rabbit trail, Sean, and I hope I'm pronouncing your name. The Amazon rabbit trail. Basically, you go to Amazon, you look up a similar book to yours. Let's say you're, this is what we did. You see my book behind me. That's just my normal background these days. When I launched that book, I did, we had over 500 affiliates from a book we made.
Made USA Today bestsellers. We barely missed wall street journal. I don't have a particularly large list when I launched the book. Trying to think I did over 225 podcast interviews. How did they do that? Cause I went to Amazon. I did exactly what we've done for others. We've launched multiple bestselling books for clients.
Went to Amazon. I looked up one book that was similar to the one that I'm promoting in this case, similar to my book, one book. And then I went and found the people who promoted that book. Now I looked specifically at books that launched in the last two years. Two, two and a half years. And I looked at people who promoted that book three weeks before the publication date to three weeks after.
I didn't want people who were talking about it six months later. I wanted people who promote book launches. All right. This is the key. So when I go to Google and type in that stuff, I make sure to narrow the search results to a six week window on either side of. The pub date. All right, which it shows the pub date on Amazon.
It's January 10th, 2023. All right. So I look up the first book and I find 27 people who promoted that book, 10 interviews and 17 blog posts, right? And I go find them. I had them to list. I go find them. Amazon does all the work for me. Cause what does Amazon do guys? It says people who read this book or bought this book also bought this book.
It's a never ending rabbit trail. We looked hundreds of books similar to mine, and we just found one after one after the other found people who promoted those books who promoted those book launches. So Sean, that's the same as how you do it for books. Same way for courses. You go find people who promoted similar courses.
And you make them your affiliates, other promotional partners, number one, your customers, somebody just mentioned that in the chat, who's better to promote you than your customers. Live events are probably the costliest way to recruit affiliates, but they're also the most effective if you're at a live event talking about a topic.
Go back to my organic gardening, you're in an organic gardening. Urban garden. That's why I said not organic urban gardening conference. You know what? Those people there are very likely to be good affiliates and you're going to be able to form great relationships with them.
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