See y’all soon @Sub_Summit (@obviceo why’d u take jfk…)

I went to this dinner a few weeks ago with over 50 successful founders I was hoping that while I was there I could learn how these brands were running their affiliate programs But after talking with most of them I kept noticing they were ALL making one of these 7 mistakes: 1) Having a weak offer As with everything else in this world - if your offer sucks, nobody will want to take it The same goes for affiliates I see so many brand owners giving away 10%, 15%, or even 20% affiliate fees - as though people get excited about a $10 check on a $50 product. It just doesn’t make any sense. If you want your affiliates to want to promote your product in the most authentic way You need to give them a bigger piece of the pie - to ultimately expand the pie for everyone, With our brands, we give up to 50% commission to our best affiliates. … and although it seems like A LOT, the mindset shift you need to make is; Do I want to send 50% to Zuckerberg or 50% to my best affiliates? Eventually, you’ll need to choose one of them either way (PS: Only one of them will also create tons of authentic content for you) 2) Only working with influencers and not actual customers Besides the offer, this is the biggest mistake I see when it comes to affiliate marketing. Your customers are already your best advocates. They know your product, they love your product, and they are oftentimes willing to promote your product (for free). Why not make it more lucrative for them to promote it to their circle of influence? Here’s how we do it. After 30 days from a customer purchase, we have an automatic trigger in Sendlane that sends an email to our best customers and asks them to sign up for our affiliate program through @socialsnowball If they want to join - they can click the link in the email and get their affiliate account set up in less than 5 minutes and be ready to earn their affiliate commission. Or even better - you can turn on “turn customers into affiliates via purchase” and ALL customers going forward become an official affiliate for you. 3) Doing manual payouts Automation and technology is your best friend when it comes to payout and management of ANY stakeholder working with your company - especially affiliates (because there can easily be thousands of them) We use @socialsnowball to manage this. It helps us get away from manual transactions, massive spreadsheets, and just overall chaos. 4) Links being leaked to Honey Most of you are double-paying for customers that come through affiliates. You just don’t know it yet because your discount codes are being leaked to websites like Honey. This sucks, a lot. Especially because a few leaked discount codes can easily shrink your margins into non-existence. The way to solve this is by using Safelinks instead of discount codes 5) Not whitelisting your affiliates' posts If a post performs well organically - it makes all the sense in the world to throw some ad $ behind it and distribute it to a much larger audience. 6) Working with affiliates that don’t fit your brand If an affiliate has a large following but doesn’t fit your brand - it doesn’t make sense to work with them. A small audience of 10 people with really strong influence over their audience and a perfect fit with your product is 1,000x better than an audience of 100,000 people with weak influence and a bad fit with your product. 1,000x! Shoutout to @ryanbbabenzien for preaching this 7) Poor performance tracking Affiliate marketing is NOT a set-it-and-forget-it type of channel You need to stay on top of answering these questions: A) Who are your best affiliates? B) What are their strengths? (i.e. blogging vs. video creation) C) How can you work closer with them? The only way you can do this is by having strong performance tracking, broken down by each affiliate. If you liked this post - remember to bookmark it + implement it in your business this week! For those curious - I'm a #ProudSponsor of @socialsnowball and they've helped us immensely with our affiliate programs. Definitely recommend giving them a look!