There is a monumental shift happening in affiliate marketing, with huge implications for you! If you miss it, you’re going to get left behind! I’ve been predicting this shift would happen for years…in fact, I was the one who started it six years ago. It’s changing the entire landscape of affiliate marketing…and I’m excited to share all about it in this episode.

Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode

Links Mentioned in this Episode

Turn Your Passions Into Profits

7 Reasons Why You Should Work with Small Affiliates

Michele Caruana – How a First Time Affiliate Earned Top 25 In A Huge Launch And Made Over $18,000

How Gwyn Morasko Made Over $10,000 from Affiliate Marketing With a List of Less Than 200 People

How do Small Affiliates Massively Outperform Their List Size and Following?

War of Art Book

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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy

Why Teenagers Are So Successful At Affiliate Marketing…And What You Can Learn From Them

How to Use a Virtual Assistant to Find Affiliates

Creative Ways to Triple Your Affiliate Commissions

Affiliate Fraud: How to Spot it and What to do About It

The Importance of Getting Personal in Your Affiliate Promotions

Launch Lessons: The Affiliate Army Strikes Again

The Massive Shift in Affiliate Marketing…and The Opportunity it’s Creating for YOU!

There is a monumental shift happening in affiliate marketing with huge implications for you.

If you miss It, you’re going to get left behind.I’ve been predicting this shift would happen for years.

In fact, I was the One who started It about six or seven years ago, and it’s changing the entire landscape of affiliate Marketing, and I’m so excited to share all about it in this episode.

Over the past few years, we’ve run multiple multimillion dollar affiliate launches, and they look nothing like the launches that we ran in 2010, 2012, 2015 even, like 2017 and 2018 because of the seismic shift that’s occurring in the industry.

So what is the shift? I’ve talked about this a bunch.

The shift is that affiliate programs are moving away from the model of only working with big, established affiliates, and they’re moving more toward building an army of small, engaged affiliates. I’ve had multiple private conversations with high level entrepreneurs, many of whom are clients, and they are on board with this Trend.

The traditional model is getting thrown out the window, and this new model is the model of the Future. Really, it’s the model right now. And the thing Is, I’ve talked A lot about this from the perspective of affiliate managers, affiliate programs, entrepreneurs like, 

“Hey, here’s the Thing. If you want to build a $10 million affiliate program, you can’t just have $3 million affiliates and then a million dollar affiliate, and that’s it. You can’t just have, like, $10 million affiliates. You need to have a million, $10 Affiliates. That’s not the case either.It’s in between there, right?”

You need to have hundred $100,000 affiliates, or really, you need to have fifty $100,000 affiliates, fifty $50,000 affiliates, two hundred  $10,000 affiliates, and so on down the Line. That’s the now of affiliate programs and this is creating opportunities for affiliates that I want to talk about Today.

Now, the first thing I want to do here and I’ve heard some of this before, but I actually want to share an excerpt from my Book, Turn Your Passions Into Profits.I’m going to share an excerpt from that about the advantages of being Small. 

So from an affiliate perspective, what are the advantages that you have? And then I want to turn around at the End, and I want to share what this means specifically for affiliate Marketing. And I will share five things for you. 

Five things for you.These are things that are opportunities that this shift is creating. Because as affiliate programs begin to shift their thinking and realize what I’m talking about in this episode, more and more they’re going to bring on smaller Affiliates.

And I’m hearing less and less of, Well, I got declined because I’m a nobody. I got declined because I don’t have much traffic. I got a client in because I don’t have enough social media followers. That was a big thing four or five years ago. It was a big thing 15 years ago, just to be clear.

But it was really a big thing about five years ago. It’s just like the pendulum has swung 2005 through 2010 was like, they accepted everybody. 2010 through 2017, 18 was like, you get very picky and now we’re shifting to where I think there’s a good balance. It’s not the accept everybody model.

We talked about affiliate fraud. We talked 1012 episodes ago about who to accept into your affiliate program, and what to look for. But the pendulum has finally gone to the middle, which is where it should be. You don’t accept 100% of affiliates. There are reasons to decline, which we talked about before, but we’re not declining people because they’re too small.

That’s what we don’t want to do as an affiliate program manager or entrepreneur or somebody running a CMO, whatever it might be. 

So I start off first from the affiliate perspective. Again, the advantage of being small, and this is an excerpt I’m going to share an excerpt from my book, Turn Your Passions into Profits. But here in a moment. The thing is when we’re first starting out when you are a small affiliate, you feel like you’re at a disadvantage because you don’t have the list size, you don’t have the follower account, you don’t have the experience.

But what if I told you those perceived disadvantages were actually advantages? What if they were assets that you could use to your benefit?

So before we continue with this shift in affiliate marketing and how to take advantage of it, it’s important to take a moment to acknowledge that you might not feel up to the task before you hear.

And if that’s the case, let me just assure you this is totally normal, okay? It can be so overwhelming to think about competing against those long-entrenched influencers in your niche, right? It’s intimidating to think of the mind-boggling amount of work that lies ahead of you.

And it can be scary to think of putting yourself out there against those people who are huge. They’re the names that everybody’s heard of. They’re the industry leaders, right? Those feelings are perfectly normal.

I want to share with you in this episode, five strategies. First of all, I’m going to share five opportunities for affiliates. And so, as I said, these are an excerpt from my upcoming book, Turn Your Passions into Profits. And you’re getting a little bit of a sneak peek here, by the way.

I’m going to put a link if you want to go ahead and check out the preorder stuff that we’re doing for the bug. It’s pretty awesome, but it’s not coming out for a long time. But go to Passionsintoprofitsbook.com.

I’ll put that link in the show notes, and you can check out the pre-order stuff we have going on because we got some amazing bonuses that you don’t want to miss. 

So go ahead and grab a copy. It’s not the last time I’m going to talk about it, but go ahead and grab a copy, because now is better than never. Now it’s better than later because of those pre-order bonuses. So go check that out.

All right, so in Turn your passions into profits, I talked about the advantages of being small, and here’s an excerpt from the book. Stop comparing yourself to others. If you’re just starting out, stop comparing yourself to others who’ve been doing this for years. There are two quotes I share with my coaching clients any time they are discouraged about their progress.

The first is from best-selling author John Acuff

“Never compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.”

Right now, you might be struggling just to come up with a few blog topics, and your graphics look amateurish. And you look at someone else’s website and they have professional photography on episode 600 of their podcasts.  That’s great for them. But don’t compare your beginning to their middle.

The second quote is from Steven Ferdik. “The reason we struggle with Insecurity is that we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.” 

Remember, you only see people’s highlight reels whether it’s on social media or their blogs. Most people are only posting the finished products. They’re posting their good stuff.

You don’t see the late nights, the stress, and the crap that comes out first. You don’t see them banging their head against the wall, trying to get WordPress to function, or struggling to come up with content. But trust me, those struggles are real.

Playing Your Own Game in his book David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of a man named Vivek Rana Deva, who coached a basketball team made up of twelve-year-old girls. Vivek and all the girls were new to the game of basketball. Let that sink in for a moment.

All new players were the coach that had never played the game. And we all know the end of that story, right? The team gives its all, but lacks skill and knowledge. cripples them. In the end. They probably only win a few games, if any. But that isn’t what happened at all. Because Vivek and his girls didn’t know the norms.

They didn’t play the same game as everyone else. They used their ignorance to their advantage. Your biggest excuses might be your biggest assets. Your ignorance gives you options others don’t have.

Vivek’s team played a style of basketball, unlike anything the other teams had ever experienced. They pressed the entire game. That means rather than let the other team dribble the ball to half-court and begin playing defense there, they pressure the other team from the inbounds pass all the way up the court.

Many times the other teams could not even get the ball in bounds. And when they did, Vivek’s girls swarmed the opposing player. They were relentless. Many times they were so dominant and the pressure was so much for the other team that they found themselves up by scores of 30 – 4, 20 – 0 and the other teams essentially gave up.

Ultimately, they made it to the national championship game. The advantages of Disadvantages. So how does a man who never played basketball coach a team who never played basketball to the national championship game?

Here’s what Gladwell writes: we spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options.

In other words, we rarely stop to consider how our ignorance can actually work for us. We say things like, I don’t have enough experience. I don’t have the right connections. I don’t understand my niche enough. When we do that, we forget that those excuses might be our biggest asset.

Gladwell goes on to write. Ranadivé coached a team of girls who had no talent in the sport he knew nothing about. He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of. He did the same thing asking you to do, consider your ignorance your biggest asset.

Use your lack of knowledge to your advantage. Play your own game. Embrace your fears. Fear is not something to be afraid of, as Franklin Roosevelt suggested. It’s the very thing crying out to you, telling you what you are meant to do. 

In his bestseller The War of Art, Steven Pressfield writes, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. The more scared we are of a worker calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. You need fear to live a life that actually means something, to do what you were born to do, to build a meaningful platform, to reach the world with your message, to find fulfillment in life, you need to embrace fear.

My advice to you as you continue this book: stop running from fear and start running to it. When you get a lump in your throat as you read this book, or question your ability to do something, embrace it. If an exercise at the end of a chapter scares you, do it.

If you need help along the way in reaching out to someone that terrifies you, reach out immediately. If they don’t reply, don’t sigh in relief. Follow up again and again and again. 

To quote another Roosevelt Eleanor this time the encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may think at the time, it is an impossibility, and you go through the torture of the damned.

Once you have met it and lived through it, you find that forever after, you are freer than you ever were before. And if you can live through that, you can live through anything.  You gain strength and confidence by every experience in which you stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, I live through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along. 

The danger lies in refusing to face the fear and not daring to come to grips with it. If you fail anywhere along the line, it will take away your confidence. You must make yourself succeed every time.  You must do the thing you think you cannot do. 

Fear is a sign of greatness. Listen to what your fear is really telling you. It’s telling you what’s important. The very thing it’s trying to keep you from might just be your destiny. Embrace the fear and learn to live with it.

Because, as Stephen Pressfield writes again in The War of Art, the amateur believes he must first overcome his fear. Then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome.

He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or dread-free artist. Amateurs believe that they have to overcome their fears and get past their doubts.  Then they can create their masterpiece. Then they can create their product. Then they can start their blog, start their podcast, and record their first video.

But the professional knows that fear can never be overcome. If I waited to overcome my fear before I recorded my first video. I would have never shot the first one if I’d waited until I overcame my fear of writing, you wouldn’t be listening to this book right now.

No.

I did everything meaningful while scared to death.

I did it with doubts.

I did it with fear.

I did it with insecurity and anxiety.

I did it with all those negative feelings inside of me.

When I promoted my first affiliate offer, I’ll share more about how you can monetize with affiliate marketing in step Nine. I did so with an intense fear of how my audience would respond.

This was the first time I’d promoted someone else’s product to my audience, will they unsubscribe, or stop following me? Hate me forever? I didn’t know how they would respond, but I did it.

 I was so unambitious that my goal was to make just two sales. I ended up selling eight courses and made $588. The following year, I made more than $10,000 promoting the same course, the next year, $14,000, and the next year I made $19,991 promoting that course. But it all started with that first promotion, that first step, in spite of the fear I felt. 

So the professional knows that fear cannot be overcome. They know that there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or dread-free artist. 

In fact, there’s no such thing as a successful person in any field who wasn’t fearful when they started.

There’s no such thing as a successful person who didn’t drag what might happen when they put their creativity, their product, or their art out into the world. 

You are professional. The moment you declare you are, you say that you’re a professional blogger, podcaster, or whatever, and you are. Now start acting like it. Stop letting the fear hold you back. 

All right, declaration time. I am a professional. I take action in spite of fear, discomfort, and doubt. Work with fear.

Do it scared.

Do it with doubt.

Do it with anxiety.

Do it when it’s uncomfortable.

And remember, this isn’t life or death. The kind of fear you’re feeling is not a warning sign of your impending extinction. There are no negative lasting consequences of moving forward.

Only lessons learned and experiences gained. So move forward, and it will get easier each time. Your Hidden Superpower you have a superpower and don’t even know it.

Every one of us has an amazing superpower, but we must give something up to use it. Superpower is defined; as a power that lies within someone usually unidentified. They can be used to save lives, bring hope to others, and change the world. I have a superpower, but I didn’t know it until my friend and former client Jeff Goins pointed it out to me.

I spoke with Jeff years ago for his book The Art of Work. At the time, I had never spoken to Jeff before, and we were only Twitter friends at best. In a 40 minutes interview, I shared my story of finding my calling in life. Afterward, he sent me this email. In reviewing the first email you sent me and then relistening to the audio from our interview yesterday, something struck me.

Your original email talked a lot about how you started making a living and a good living and doing what you love. Money, it seemed, was an important part of that equation. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think a lot of good can be done with the money.

But it didn’t seem like that great of a story. Still, I was curious to talk to you more, than when you told me you were fired four different times, and each time you failed your way a little bit more towards your calling. I thought, now that’s the story anyway, just one dude’s opinion.

But if you aren’t focusing on that when you tell your story, you might try it. There’s a lot of power to it, especially given the amount of failure and rejection you face and how God was using all that stuff to get you to where you are now. Yeah, it’s cool that you make a good living. Really cool. And it’s even cooler that you have the heart to be generous.

But what will give people hope and again, pardon my being so bold in sharing this, is that there is humanity to the story that you failed and still somehow succeeded. That’s the kind of hope people need.

It’s the kind of hope that I need. In my first email to Jeff, I focus solely on the money and successes, with only lip service given to the minor failures in my journey.

Why did I focus on these parts of the story? 

Why did I not share the real story, the one that Jeff actually loved to hear? 

One word insecurity.  I was trying to impress Jeff. That was it. But as we talked, the real story came to light.

I was fired by my dad, which forced me to start my first marketing consulting firm. I learned marketing because my dad hired me to help him teach golf. I spent hours learning how to write ads and got really good at online marketing and web design.

So when he fired me, I had a side business already in place, which led to my friend hired me to help his new business. It was only supposed to be a consulting gig, but soon I was working with him full time. When I was fired four years later, my friend introduced me to another business owner for whom I would soon work.

I would leave that company to go back to my previous company. I have fired again nine months later. Thankfully, I had recently started a side business consulting entrepreneurs and online marketing, which I built into a very profitable, enjoyable business.

Claim your superpower. Jeff was right. My real story is a good story. But I’m like most people, we don’t feel that there is power in our real stories. So we polish them, share the exciting parts, and wrap them up in pretty little bows. And then we wonder why they are dull and don’t resonate with anyone. It’s because we stripped our stories of the sources of their power.

You may not be a cancer survivor turned triathlete, or have lost a limb only to become an Olympian, or overcome being a single mother on welfare to one day become a Fortune 500 CEO, but you still have a story. You do. Your story. 

One that people will relate to, one that will inspire someone, one that will change the world. One that you must share. You see, you have a superpower. The power to save lives, bring hope and change the world. Your story has your superpower, but you must give up the insecurity that comes with sharing it. 

So repeat after me. I have a unique and inspiring story. My story brings hope to others. I will share my story openly, and honestly, for the benefit of others. Lives will be changed. I have the power to change the world. Say that out loud. Write out those words. Mean them. 

Now, at the end of each chapter, there’s a list of exercises. And in the book, this is from step two, which is all about choosing to be a leader. It’s about the willful choice to be a leader.

So the context for what I just shared with you is actually in the context of realizing that you don’t need to be like, a super big expert or a social media influencer to be a leader. At the end of the chapter, I have exercised into each chapter, into each step in the path to turn your passions into profits. 

There are exercises. I want to share the exercise in this chapter with you. And again, you can get all of these if you preorder the book. It’s going to be a while, but go ahead and pre-order it and we’ll get it to you ASAP when the book comes out. It’s actually early next year, January 10, 2023. But go ahead and pre-order because there are a ton of bonuses. If you go check out the website, you’ll see all those.

The first exercise is to make a list of the ways that your ignorance might be an advantage. What are those ways? What are some of the ways that ignorance might be an advantage?

The other exercise is, what are some of your deepest fears with regard to starting a platform or building a business based on your message? How could those fears be telling you exactly what you need to do?

The fourth exercise, because the second exercise is pertaining to another part of the chapter that we didn’t accept here, so it wouldn’t make any sense.

So there are five exercises in the chapter, I’m sure. Four with you. The fourth one is what is one thing with regards to your platform that you think you cannot do? What’s one thing that you think, you know what? I cannot do that thing. So do it. That’s kind of a cool one. Just do it. 

And then the last exercise, embrace your superpower. Write out your entire story as it relates to your platform. Don’t just include the highlights, but the dark parts, right? The missteps, the mistakes, the rabbit trails that you chased the wrong path, that you went down.

All that and commit to sharing that story with everyone who needs to hear it. Okay, Matt, all of this stuff is great. Got it.Superpowers. And overcoming fears and ignorance is an advantage. Being small is an advantage.

But what does this mean for affiliate marketing? Well, the first thing it means is that affiliate programs are opening up. This shift means that more affiliate programs are opening their platforms to smaller affiliates. If you were previously declined by a program for being, quote-unquote, too small, consider reapplying. If they still decline you.

I’m going to link to this in the show notes. Go share my post with them. Seven Reasons why you should work with small affiliates. I showed them in there why it’s dumb to decline small affiliates and why they need to accept them. I’ve heard from dozens and dozens of affiliates sharing that post with affiliate managers who changed their minds and got them accepted.

So sharing that post works. It’s not just a self-serving thing like, yeah, go share my post with your affiliate manager and maybe they’ll buy something from me. That’s not where we’re going with this.

It walks them through why this is a good business decision for them. That’s what this is about. They’re going to do what’s best for them as an affiliate manager. They’re working on commission, generally speaking.

Typically, they might have a salary plus commission or a retainer plus commission or something. They’re working on commission, so make it really easy for them to make more money. 

Number two, you can use your smallness to your advantage. This is what we were talking about. Take advantage of your smallness.

Smaller affiliates can do things larger affiliates can’t, like personal reach outs. I hear this from people all the time. They got a tiny list. So what do they do? They engage with the ones, one on one that is the most active. They have only 35, 40 really active people.

So they engage with them and they close. One other day, I remember, it was like 38 people on her entire list, and made six sales of a $2,500 course. $15,000 in sales from 38 people. That’s not possible with 3800 even to make 600 sales. It’s not even possible with 380 to make 60 sales. But with 38, she made 15 thousand dollars.

The top of my head commissions. At $6,000 in commission, she made $6,000 from 38 people. It’s crazy. Or building a long runway to a specific promotion, showing up on workshops.

Actually, when you’re smaller, you can go to the workshops. Some of the workshops are things you want to go to anyway. You go to the webinar, you’re in the chat. You may only have ten people on that webinar, and you close four of them. You can have small, intimate Facebook groups that only have 25 people.

So I’ve got some specific resources I want to share with you. These are two interviews and then one video that we did that I recommend watching. And I’m going to link to these in the show notes, right? The first one is with Michelle Caruana. 

The title is called How a First Time Affiliate Earn Top 25 in a Huge Launch and Made Over $18,000 in Tiny, tiny List in a niche that’s not even specific to the product. Did over $18,000 in commissions, like, almost $50,000 in sales. So if you go to mattmcwilliams.com/michelecaruana, quite frankly, told me how to pronounce her name.

It’s kind of like, well, I’ll let you figure that out. With Carolina. It’s like car. OOH, Anna.

Just go to the show notes. You’ll see the link there. Do you want to go check that out?

The other ones with Gwyn Morasko. She made over $10,000 just from affiliate marketing with a list of less than 200 people. With a list of less than 200 people. $10,000.00  Less than 200 people? Well, not I only have 100 people. Okay, then maybe you can only make $5,000. Holy crap. $5,000.00  That’s what the average American makes in a month, and you can do it with 100 people.

If you want to find out how she did it, go to mattmcwilliams.com/gwynmorasko, I won’t spell it for you. Just go click on the show notes and then another one. I did a video.

How do small affiliates massively outperform their list size and following? Do you want to find out how Mattmcwilliams.com.com outperform the video will link to that in the show notes as well? I walk you through exactly how small affiliates are. 600 followers making ten, $15,000 2000 followers and they’re finishing top ten on these big leaderboards. Right?

Tiny, tiny lists and following.They’re massively outperforming it. They’re outputting their coverage. As people often say about me being married to my wife, I did output on my coverage. The third thing that it’s doing for affiliates is you’re learning your role. Being small allows you to play around with your messaging, your methods, and your role. You need to learn your role and then you need to stick to it.

What is your role? I share seven archetypes in the book. I’m going to walk you through real quick what those are. The key here is you need to play around with it. You might have two that really stick out to you.

When I make this list and you go, gosh, it’s one of those two and I don’t know which one it is. So pick both of them and try to figure it out. Which one works better for you and your audience? Which one are you more comfortable with? Right? Are you the master maestro?

So this is the seasoned veteran in your industry who leads with authority, power, and prestige, right? This is like you are the expert, you are the guru. You’re Gandalf in Lord of the Rings. Your Yoda in Star Wars, right?  Then there’s on the flip side, there’s the hesitant hero. This is the one with the humble origin story.

Leads from a place of awe and wonder. So Frodo and Lord of the Rings or Spiderman, right? The jolly journeyman is number three, who is only one step ahead of your followers, and simply shares what you discover along the way.

So Harry Potter or Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz? You’re just on the journey. You’re staying one step ahead. Maybe you’re the eager enthusiast who leads with passion and enthusiasm.

So you’re running through brick walls. You don’t even know which way you’re going. You’re Tarzan. You’re Luke Skywalker, right? You’re going to charge the gates of h*** and you have no idea how you’re going to do it.

The fifth one is the venerable visionary. So you lead with innovation, creativity, and wonder in real life. Think Steve Jobs in fiction. Think of Willy Wonka. And then the 6th one is the revolutionary rebel. You’re mad at h***, at the status quo and you’re not going to take it anymore.

By gosh, Katniss Everdeen from the Hunger Games comes to mind. Indiana Jones, Ferris Bueller are some examples of that. And then the last one is the cordial caregiver. So Mary, Poppins, Obiwan, and Kenobi are great examples of this. They lead with love, generosity, strong desire to protect their flock.

The thing is, it doesn’t matter what role you pick. You pick a couple, try them out, but then stick to it. Be clear on your role and don’t bounce around from role to role. Like you can’t be the hesitant hero one day and then be the master maestro of the next. You can’t do both of those. By the way.

I would never go back and forth between those two, but you might early on say, gosh, I’m either the eager enthusiast or the revolutionary rebel, because they’re kind of similar. Or the venerable visionary and the master maestro.

It could be the hesitant hero in the jolly journeyman and see which one of those, or even the hesitant hero and the eager enthusiast, or the jolly journeyman and the eager enthusiast. Or you could be the cordial caregiver and eager enthusiast, hesitant hero, and cordial caregiver.

You can play around with these and see which one. But eventually you need to settle on one.

If you don’t settle on one, your audience is not going to know if you’re truly leading with on one, or if you’re the leading expert who knows the answer already.

If you go from cordial caregiver to revolutionary rebel, then your audience is going to rebel against you.

They came to you because you’re loving and soothing, not because you take on the establishment.

So pick a role. Make sure that every piece of content, every message, and every affiliate promotion fits that role.

The fourth thing that this is, the opportunity this is creating here, is that you get access to a mastermind.

One of the best parts of being a small affiliate is you get to learn from the bigger ones. So if the affiliate program has a Facebook group, and they should, the big affiliates will often share their wisdom with the group.

I remember years ago, Jeff Walker wrote when we ran Michael Hyatt’s affiliate launch, he wrote this essay in response to a comment. I’m talking on a computer. It was three pages downs on a 24-inch monitor. It was just huge. It took him there’s no way it took him less than 15 minutes. You got his best thinking on the subject for 15 minutes, and 20 minutes.

It was a Masterclass in how to run an affiliate promotion, and you got access for free. If you were an affiliate, it didn’t matter if you didn’t even make a sale, you could have done $0 and you got access to Jeff Walker’s wisdom. But even if they don’t do that, it’s a great place to effectively mastermind with other affiliates.

You ask questions, strategize with them, crowdsource, ideas, and cheer each other on. We do our strategy calls. By the way, affiliate managers, you should be doing these or don’t do them, just leave them to us, because then we stand out more. We do our strategy call. Sometimes people be like, hey, what do you think of this bonus package? And the affiliates will start talking and I’ll just let them roll.

As affiliate programs open up their requirements and allow more small affiliates. It’s a great opportunity to take advantage of these groups and learn from others. So do it. And then fifth, you get to connect with others again. As affiliate programs open up their requirements and small affiliates can join. 

Now it gives you an opportunity to connect with other affiliates both big and small. These affiliates can be potential affiliates of yours. They can be potential podcast guests. They can be podcasts for you to be on.

Potential book contributors, mastermind members, clients, and friends. Some of my best business relationships are the result of promoting the same product as someone else and then using that as a connection. That’s how I first connected with Jonathan Milligan from Blogging Your Passion.

We are both promoting Michael Hyatt. Five days to the best you ever were. Both are in the top ten on The Leaderboard. He recognized my name, but we’ve never met, so use that as an opportunity to reach out. That 1-hour phone conversation turned into a friendship, and today we’ve been in a Mastermind together.

He just endorsed my book. He’s going to promote the book. I’m going to do some other stuff with them. We’ve cultivated a great relationship, and over the past few years, I’ve initiated and cultivated dozens of relationships just from affiliate leaderboards.

So make sure to use affiliate promotions as an opportunity to connect with other people promoting the same thing. Those relationships can be very profitable long term, and if you do well-promoting someone, they might even promote you as well. It doesn’t always work out that way, but people want to help those who have helped them. So don’t promote something just because the person might

promote you. Promote stuff that’s good for your audience but can turn into some great relationships.

So opportunities are opening up like never before in the affiliate world, so take advantage of them.

Reap the benefits of this massive shift in affiliate marketing. If you’ve got questions about anything about the book now she wants to promote the book, reach out to me, text me. 260-217-4619.

If you got questions about the opportunities we talked about, maybe the affiliate management side, the book, or anything that I talked about in this episode, text me anytime at 260-217-4619.

And lastly, make sure you hit subscribe because you don’t want to miss the next episode. I’m going to share what top affiliates are doing this year, according to award-winning affiliate manager Jamie Birch.

Jamie is one of my favorite people who’ve been friends for over a decade now.

I beat him one year for Affiliate Manager of the year. He beat me one year, so we kind of went back and forth with that for a while. And he’s a really good dude and he’s also in Quarterlyn, Idaho hometown of our operations manager Robbie Miles. So, the fun fact there, so make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t

miss that.

It’s going to be a great episode. I’ll see you then.