Ep 46: Get More Referrals by Turning Customers into Affiliates with Matt McWilliams
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Get More Referrals by Turning Customers into Affiliates with Matt McWilliams
You customers can become your best source of new customers. If you've ever wondered how to get customers inside your programs to become really great referral partners, this episode breaks down exactly how to do that.
My friend, Matt McWilliams, The Affiliate Guy, is an absolute expert when it comes to affiliates and affiliate management, which is how I came into Matt's world. We worked with some of the same people, me on the community side, him on the affiliate side. It’s the merger of those two worlds - your customer community and affiliates - that we are going to talk about today.
PS - Matt recently wrote a book called Turn Your Passion Into Profits that gives step-by-step guidance for turning your passions into a profitable and lasting business. Click the link above to preorder the book and get special bonuses.
And before we go on, I want to break the myth that you need big affiliate partnerships to experience success. I have seen business owners get thousands of new customers from existing customers referring people in. So stop waiting around for Amy Porterfield to call and start equipping your customers to invite people into the community they know and love.
I’m going to do my best to summarize everything that Matt shared, but this was an hour long, jam-packed episode. If you’re serious about turning your customers into affiliates, you’ll want to listen to the full episode and be ready with pen and paper in hand.
Make Communities Really Great Experiences
Step 0: Create Raving Fans
Only raving fans are going to put their reputation on the line and promote you, so you've got to get them to that point. That’s where the community aspect comes in. Matt’s advice was to follow everything I teach. So if you want to do that, check out my community training program.
Step 1: Just Ask
The next thing you do is you just ask and present the opportunity. Many of your customers are already promoting you or they want to. It's not that complicated. You reach out to them by every means necessary. You share in your community platform. You do a public post. You do individual emails. You can even do DMs. Reach out to them one-on-one and in public.
The great thing about the public post is you start to get a little bit of social proof. People are posting, I'm in, I'm in, I'm in. The other community members see that and say “oh, they're in, I guess I should be in too”. Matt says to always start with the public one. It’s frankly a really easy way to get 30, 40, 50, a hundred people to sign up.
Get the message out, and follow up, follow up, follow up. Come up with all kinds of creative ways to reach out to the community. DMs, individual messages, different subject lines, including it in a PS in an email about something else. Make sure that you mention it when you go live with your community and do a dedicated video. Ask 10, 12, 13 times through different means.
Step 2: Make it a Great Experience for Community Members
Once they sign up, make it a great experience for them. Make it easy. Affiliates are busy because they have their own businesses to run. They've got 50,000 things going on that they could be doing, and promoting you is not a priority. Their community, their business, their team members, their customers, their lives, their family, that’s their priority.
All those things come before promoting you, so make it easy. Here's your link, here's some suggested swipe copy that you should tweak and fit your own voice. Here's all the graphics in one place. Organize it by folder. Here's the Instagram folder, here's the Twitter folder, here's the Facebook folder. Here's the folders that have my picture in them. You have to make it super easy and continue to follow up with them.
They should want to be a part of your community of affiliates. Make it competitive and educational. Teach your affiliates what's working. Get on Zoom and train them how to put together a bonus package, how to warm your audience up, how to promote a webinar. Here's how to sell and how to send more emails but not get unsubscribes.
Make sure to keep it super simple. If it gets complicated, affiliates feel overwhelmed, which triggers this feeling of failure. Then they move on to something else. Once you’ve lost attention, it is so hard to get attention back.
Go back and read that over again and go listen to the entire episode because Matt just laid out for you a roadmap to a successful affiliate program.
Advice for Someone Looking to Turn Their Passions Into Profits
Matt and I had a little bonus chat during this episode that may be worth way more to you than the affiliate talk above. Here’s what I know about Matt. He loves his life, he loves his business, he loves the people that he serves. A lot of people in this industry build something that they don't love, but that’s not the case for Matt.
He has recently written a book called Turn Your Passion Into Profits that gives step-by-step guidance for turning your passions into a profitable and lasting business. Click the link above to preorder the book and get special bonuses.
It centers around an interesting word, which is leadership. At the beginning of the chapter on leadership, step two is called commit to leading. In that chapter, Matt focuses on the quote by John Maxwell that says “leadership is influence”. Once you commit to being a leader, it opens up everything else. When you see yourself as a leader, people follow you.
That's what they came to you for. They see you that way, and it can be really tough to get that through our heads. Part of it is we don't see ourselves as leaders.
We don't see ourselves being far enough ahead. We feel like we have to be so far ahead of our audience. We feel like we have to be two miles down the road. When we realize we only have to be one step ahead and then we make a commitment to leadership. You're committing to the whole process that we walk through.
Make that commitment to be a leader, and realize you already are a leader. Your followers need you to guide them. They are waiting for you to reach out your hand to grab theirs and show them where to go.
