3 Simple Strategies For Outreach To Affiliates

Want to grow your business with affiliate marketing?

Today we are going to share three simple strategies that you can use to get more people to promote your products and services…

Real Talk: How Generous is Your Affiliate Program?

Something that we see way too often is entrepreneurs launching subpar affiliate programs, then struggling to get affiliates and wondering what went wrong.

Here’s the harsh truth: if people aren’t interested in promoting your product or service, it’s probably because your commission structure isn’t generous enough. And until you fix that, no amount of outreach will help.

We would argue that in order to succeed with affiliate marketing, you need to offer commissions that are at least 30%.

And if you sell a subscription product or service, it’s best to make that commission recurring for the entire lifetime of that customer. That’s what we do here at ClickFunnels.

We currently have two pricing plans:

• The Startup plan costs $97/month. A 30% recurring commission would be $29.10/month.
• The Pro plan that costs $297/month. A 30% recurring commission would be $89.10/month.

So, for example:

If an affiliate gets 100 people to sign up for the Startup plan, that would create an income stream of $2,910/month.

They would continue to be paid a commission for each customer every month for as long as those customers stay with us.

As you can see, our affiliate program has a ton of earning potential. In fact, it’s possible to make five, six, or even seven figures with it!

Something that we have learned over the years is that the more generous your commission structure, the easier it will be for you to recruit affiliates and the harder those affiliates will work to promote your products and services.

So before you start doing any outreach, make sure that you have an amazing affiliate program that gives people an opportunity to make real money!

Affiliate Outreach Strategy #1: Cold Email

The most straightforward way to recruit affiliates is to cold email people who might be interested in joining your affiliate program.

Work Your Way Up the Influencer Hierarchy

We recommend starting with influencers who have less than 1,000 followers. Why?

Because they are more likely to open your cold email, read it, and reply to it. Plus, with an audience that size, they won’t be used to getting pitches like that, so they are probably going to be excited about the opportunity. 

The high response rate from these micro influencers can help you optimize your cold email and your follow-up email templates, your affiliate onboarding process, and your affiliate program itself.

Once you have streamlined everything, you can progress to influencers who have between 1,000 and 10,000 followers, then to those who have between 10,000 and 100,000 followers, and then finally to the ones who have 100,000+ followers.

Build Social Proof

As you work your way up this hierarchy, you want to create buzz around your affiliate program so that it will have some credibility by the time you start reaching out to influencers with 100,000+ followers.

Think about it: if someone with a large following opens and reads your cold email, they will likely want to see what other people have to say about your affiliate program. 

If they can’t find any information about it, they will probably get sketched out. But if they see a bunch of social media posts, articles, and video reviews, they might decide to give it a shot.

So encourage your affiliates to announce joining your program, review your products and services, and maybe even share their results with their followers if doing that makes sense in their niche.

We also recommend writing up case studies featuring your most successful affiliates and then using them as social proof in your cold emails.

Provide Guidance

If you want your affiliates to get great results, you need to provide them with as much guidance as possible.

So don’t be afraid to do things that don’t scale: get on calls with them, review their marketing campaigns, give them feedback, etc. 

Help them succeed so that you can then leverage that success to recruit more people to your affiliate program!

Book Recommendation: “Cold Email Manifesto” by Alex Berman and Robert Indries

This book includes advice on how to avoid getting blacklisted by email service providers, templates for both the initial cold email and the follow-up emails, strategies for scaling cold outreach, and more. 

While it was written with the purpose of helping entrepreneurs get more clients for their service businesses, its lessons can also be applied to recruiting affiliates!

Affiliate Outreach Strategy #2: Webinars

Another way to recruit affiliates is to use cold email to pitch webinars to influencers.

You want to offer them this deal: they promote your webinar to their audience and get people to register for it, you host the webinar and pitch your product or service at the end of it, and then the two of you split the proceeds.

This approach requires very little work on the part of the influencer while giving them an opportunity to make some money, which makes it more appealing than regular affiliate marketing.

Consequently, you can use it to get your foot in the door so to speak: if you can persuade an influencer to promote your webinar and they make some money that way, they will likely be open to joining your affiliate program after that.

What is a Webinar Funnel?

You can use our software, ClickFunnels, to build a webinar funnel for your business.

Here’s what this funnel looks like:

1. A webinar registration page where you explain what your webinar is all about and encourage potential customers to register for the event.
2. A registration confirmation page where you confirm that the potential customer has successfully registered for the webinar and let them know what they should expect next.
3. A webinar page where the potential customer can either attend your webinar live or watch the replay.

Our template library includes a proven webinar funnel template so all you need to do is customize it with our drag-and-drop page editor!

How to Structure Your Webinar?

Your webinar is supposed to serve as your lead magnet.

It should provide a complete solution to a narrowly defined problem that is related to the problem that your product or service addresses.

As for the webinar structure, we recommend using the “Hook, Story, Offer” copywriting framework:

1. Hook the attendees with a compelling premise. What is the number one benefit that they are going to get from this event? Lead with that.
2. Tell the attendees a captivating story that resonates with them on a deep emotional level. Ideally, it should be either about how you overcame the same challenge that they are struggling with or about how you helped someone else do that.
3. Transition from your story to your sales pitch and then end the webinar with a call to action encouraging the attendees to buy your product or service. You can add an element of urgency by offering special bonuses to people who make the purchase within the next 72 hours.

While it is possible to automate your webinar funnel entirely, we recommend doing it live at least once a week for a year. Why?

Because that will enable you to optimize your webinar script for maximum conversions based on the audience’s feedback!

Book Recommendation: “Expert Secrets” by Russell Brunson

Our co-founder Russell Brunson used this approach to get ClickFunnels off the ground during our first year in business.

Back then, he would aim to do 5-7 webinars a week. Sometimes, he would end up doing 2-3 webinars on the same day. 

And it paid off: we went from zero to $10M in annual revenue in just one year (it’s at $100M+ now)!

Doing so many webinars helped Russell develop his high-converting “Perfect Webinar” framework. 

He discusses this framework in detail in one of his best-selling books, “Expert Secrets”.

This book is available on Amazon where it has a 4.7-star rating but you can also get it directly from us for FREE. 

All we ask is that you cover the shipping!

Get “Expert Secrets” for FREE!

Affiliate Outreach Strategy #3: Paid Advertising

If you want to scale affiliate recruitment, you can build a squeeze page funnel for your affiliate program and then drive traffic to it with paid ads.

What is a Squeeze Page Funnel?

A squeeze page funnel has two pages:

1. A lead magnet landing page where you present your free offer and encourage the potential affiliate to get it.
2. A thank you page where you thank the potential affiliate, provide instructions for redeeming your free offer and tell them what they should expect next.

What Should You Use as Your Lead Magnet?

We recommend writing up a case study about your most successful affiliate and then using it as your lead magnet.

How to Convert Leads Into Affiliates With Email Marketing

Once a potential affiliate gives you their email address, you should send them an automated welcome email where you introduce yourself, explain what your product or service is about, and provide social proof in the form of testimonials from happy customers.

Then, you want to start regularly sending them affiliate case studies, ideally one case study per week if you have enough of them.

These case studies don’t have to be super impressive, they just need to demonstrate that people are making money with your affiliate program.

We recommend using the aforementioned “Hook, Story, Offer” framework for your case studies:

1. Hook the potential affiliate with a subject line that describes a specific result.
2. Tell a story about how one of your affiliates made money by promoting your products and services and how that money helped them improve their lives.
3. Transition from the story to the pitch for your affiliate program and end the email by encouraging the potential affiliate to join it.

Also, it might be a good idea to add a “P.S.” section to your emails where you encourage the potential affiliate to set up a 30-minute call with you if they have questions and direct them to your appointment calendar.

Note that you can easily do all this with ClickFunnels’ email marketing functionality!

How to Drive Traffic to Your Squeeze Page Funnel With Paid Ads

You want to create an ad campaign designed to promote your case study and start running it with a small daily budget.

We recommend using ClickFunnels’ A/B testing functionality to optimize your squeeze page funnel for conversions.

Ideally, you want to get to the point where you are happy with your conversion rates, cost-per-lead, and profit margins before you begin scaling your ad campaign. 

If you can’t decide what platform to advertise on, Facebook is probably your best bet because it has the largest user base and the most powerful ad targeting capabilities. 

And if you have never run Facebook ads before, you can simply pick up a course on Udemy to learn the basics (wait for a sale!).

Book Recommendation: “Copywriting Secrets” by Jim Edwards

Ultimately, if you want to build an army of affiliates, you need to master persuasion. And what is copywriting? It’s persuasion via the written word. 

Improving your copywriting skills will help you get more people to click on your ads, convert those visitors into leads, and then convert those leads into affiliates that will promote your products and services for you. 

Our friend Jim Edwards, a world-class copywriter, wrote a book for busy entrepreneurs just like you that covers everything that you need to know in order to write persuasive copy. 

“Copywriting Secrets” is available on Amazon where it has a 4.7-star rating but you can get it directly from us for FREE. 

All we ask is that you cover the shipping!

Get “Copywriting Secrets for FREE!”

Try ClickFunnels Risk-Free!

You can use ClickFunnels to build a webinar funnel for your product or service and a squeeze page funnel for your affiliate program. 

But let’s be real here: we are biased in favor of our software. Of course, we think it’s the best. We are the ones who made it!

So we understand if you take what we say about it with a grain of salt.

Fortunately, we have a free 14-day trial, so you don’t have to take our word for it. 

You can go and see ClickFunnels for yourself without any risk!

So what are you waiting for? 🧐

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