012: Setup an Affiliate Program with Clickbank, Rapid Action Profits, WarriorPlus, and JVZoo

Announcer 0:00 Robert Plank Show episode 12, how to set up an affiliate program. Quick question, if you're an author, speaker, coach or information marketer, do you want more money without doing any extra work? I want to introduce you to a good friend of mine, and his name is Robert Plank. He's a highly successful internet marketer whose businesses grossed over $1 million in sales before the age of 25 today, he's going to tell you how he earned $101,934.10 in 80 days from four low ticket products, zero traffic and a tiny list, just by using one simple technique. It's called setting up an affiliate program. Just imagine if you could recruit your customers and prospects to promote your business for you. You wouldn't have to pay for advertising, you wouldn't have to work to build a list if someone wanted to recommend your $10 $100 or 1000 plus dollar product or service, they would only have to grab a special link and generate extra sales for you. Now is the time for you to become 100% focused and discover the true recipe for recurring passive income. Hi, Robert, welcome to the show. What can you tell everyone today about making money from their own affiliate program.

Robert Plank 1:22 Well, you know what? Mr. DJ, Dave, quite a few things. And if you don't know yet what an affiliate program is, chances are you've heard of one. This is the kind of thing where you sell, let's say, an ebook, maybe an ebook, and some videos for $100 and people can recommend you using the special link, and if they send a new customer your way. Let's just say that you get 50 bucks, and they get 50 bucks every single time. And so it really frees up a lot of your time, and frees up a lot of your your energy and effort, because it means that you don't have to chase all the latest shiny objects. You don't have to investigate all the latest traffic sources. You don't have to say, well, what's the latest way of getting traffic today? Is it from this ad network or from this social network or from this other site? You just set this thing up called an affiliate program, and now you can have other people recommend you. And I mean, seriously, if you just want to get a pay raise this month, if you're making even a little bit of money online, and the best thing you can do is, let's just say for now, sign up at a site called clickbank.com, I'll just give you that right off the bat, C, l, I, C, K, B, A, n, k.com, and now click bank charges you $50 one time fee, and that's it. And they take a cut of the sales, like, I think maybe 7.5% and what's really cool about Clickbank is that they will actually handle your payments for you, and they will pay out your affiliates for you, and then they will pay you what's left over. So I don't know if you might have heard of affiliate programs from other people, where you have to keep track of, you know, payroll and taxes, mail out checks, and it ends up taking you more time and effort than it really is worth, to be honest. And so we want to give you an extra boost in traffic and in sales and in subscribers by having this thing called an affiliate program. And you, Mr. DJ Dave, recommended or mentioned this thing at the beginning, where my business partner, Lance tomashiro, and I have, in fact, and we've gone even further than this. But I mean, our most compressed amount of affiliate sales was we made 101,000 just under 102,000 actually, in 80 days. And that turned in, that was about 6770 sales. So 6770 sales from four information products, a product called free traffic fast a product called set up a fan page, a product called set up a membership site, and a product called backup creator. And we even more recently done this with products called WP import, WP notepad and paper template. So early on in my internet marketing career, I noticed a number of things. Number one was that I didn't have a lot of name recognition, and that I noticed that a lot of people were really making more money than me, and they had inferior products, inferior marketing, all that stuff, but they were making more money than me. I also noticed that some people would, you know, pass my product around, or I just, I just wasn't making as much money or as many subscribers as I wanted to. And so what I did was I just signed up for this site called ClickBank, because there were so many choices. And I'm sure maybe you've seen some choices of different affiliate networks, and this just, this was the simplest one. And so I just signed up for an account with them, paid my 50 bucks, and then I just filled in a few things. Like, you know, where am I selling my product? At what is my download page? What price do I want to charge? What percent commission do I want to give to affiliates? And they have. To go look at my site, and they said they wanted me to change a couple things, and they wanted me to add a couple of notices. And that was fine. And within about a week, I was approved on this site called ClickBank, and what I noticed was that I would end up getting a lot more what I call accidental sales people just wandering in. I had more people mention me. And what was also cool is that the piracy, the sharing of my product, went down dramatically, almost to nothing. Because if someone likes your $10 ebook, well, are they going to just give it to their friend, or are they going to try to get, you know, five or 10 bucks out of that? Well, it's a lot more of an incentive to do business in a legitimate way. And if you buy something and you like it, then you send it to your email subscribers, your Facebook subscribers, you blog about it, you send traffic to it, and then you're rewarded with the actual sales that you make. And so just by having this affiliate program set up, I made some extra sales, and then I did something that might seem obvious to you, but didn't seem too obvious to me at the time, was on my website, on my sales letter, I actually had a link down to that affiliate program so that when someone went to my web page, if they didn't want to buy this one to promote, they could find that tiny little link, get a special, you know, web address, and then they could begin setting their subscribers my way. And I mean, every now and then, even in the early days, I would randomly get, you know, 1200 bucks, for example, in a day. And I it would just kind of have come and go where, you know, in a given day, I make a flood of sales because some big name saw my product. They wanted to recommend it. They wrote one quick email to their subscribers, and then I just got all these sales, and then the next day they were gone, and it was kind of cool and also kind of frustrating at the same time, but that was all free money and free subscribers that it wouldn't have had to earn, for lack of better term otherwise. So I linked to that affiliate program, and then I began doing things like linking to the affiliate program with to my buyers, right? So after someone bought, let's say someone bought a product I had called simple PHP, then that on the download page, then they would get a link to sign up and to be an affiliate and to promote my product called simple PHP. And then I began doing things like sending emails to my subscribers, saying, here's a link to sign up. Then I began doing things like saying, Well, here's the exact email I wrote to promote symbol php. All you have to do is just copy and paste this to your own subscribers. And then I began just taking every product I had for sale and putting it online on this site called Clickbank. So even if you're already selling some kind of a digital information product online, there's nothing wrong with also selling it on Clickbank. So what you can do is just make a copy of your existing sales letter, put it in a different folder, and change the payment button from PayPal or whatever you're using, and have it go through Clickbank instead. So I began to give my affiliates these tools and and then I went to a site called $20 banners to the number two, the number $0 banners.com and I had them create, you know, some wide banners, some square banners, some log long banners, so that people could begin promoting this on their own, like vlog sidebars, for example, and and this kind of became really cool because I had a product called Action pop up, and a few prominent bloggers picked it up and liked it and began making multiple, multiple blog posts about it. At the end, they linked back to my site with their affiliate link. Now this did a few things. First of all, it made them money. So when this led to hundreds and sometimes 1000s of dollars, depending on the person, every single month, then they sure as heck wanted to talk about me some more, because just the fact that they had content mentioning me made the money. The other thing that was really powerful is that when I saw all these records, I could see which affiliates were worth going after even more, right? Which affiliates were worth my time. And I could go in and and, you know, give them free copies of my other products or interview them. And this was really cool. So I went from the point of not having the affiliate program to having an affiliate program to then getting affiliates all these interesting tools. And then at some point this trend happened. And then at the time, it was called a $7 script. And the idea here was that, well, okay, first of all, at the time, it was the norm to sell, say, up, what we call an e book, a PDF report, for between 15 and $30 all right, this was the norm years and years ago. And then some genius at some point say, you know, I'm going to be crazy and sell for $7 and that was like, such a low price point at the time. And. Then they said, you know, what else I'm going to do is, well, this is a low price, but I want people to promote it. But the problem is, when an affiliate program, people are only going to get a couple of dollars, right? They're only at $2 $3 someone buys it's worse than someone promoting an amazon.com product. So what they ended up doing was saying, Well, I'm going to give 100% of that sale to you. So, so I sell a $7 report. You promote it as an affiliate, and you don't get $3 you get all $7 and you get paid that instantly. So

Robert Plank 10:35 this is a cool little concept, and it kind of came and went, and to be honest, at when it first came out, I didn't take too much advantage of it. I think I might have committed one product that way, but to be honest, it was untested, and I was a little afraid of it, like you might be afraid of worthy mentioning this whole $7 100% commission idea. And then I met this guy named Lance Thomas, sure, who I'm now business partners with, and I have been for several years, but when I first met him, he was making about 500 to $1,000 a month. This was like when he was first, first starting out, like his first month online, or first month marketing, I should say, so, you know, I didn't, I mean, he was one of my students, took a few classes, and one time I ended up talking to one on the phone and asked him how this one product was selling. But he happened to be selling, I think it was the setup, or set up a membership site product. And I said, Well, how's it doing? He said, Oh, you know, I made about 2000 sales. And I was thinking, you mean $2,000 right? And he's like, No, this week, we made 2000 sales of that $17 product. And I was thinking, What the heck, what the heck is this guy on? What the heck is this guy doing? I mean, I had, at that point, I had built a subscriber list of buyers for years and years, very slowly and suddenly, this guy, Lance, who had a list of his own. It was small, his freebie seekers suddenly, out of nowhere, 2000 sales. And the answer was this thing called 100% commission affiliate program. And he used this in addition to all these other techniques I've been talking to you about, and the most powerful one is recruiting your buyers into affiliates. So he he did this a little bit differently. Instead of selling at $7 he sold at 17. But the idea is the same. Someone goes to this site, they see this course about membership sites for $17 they go and they buy it. On the Download page, it says, How would you like for your your purchase that you just made to be 100% free? Well, all you have to do is get one other person to buy this $17 product, and now you've made $17 now you've made your money back. If you get two people to buy. Now you've doubled your money. And I want to be really clear. Want to be really careful here. We're not talking about, you know, multi level marketing, MLM, biz, op, kind of stuff. We're just kind of sexing up our affiliate program, basically, and we are selling a real product. So when someone pays $17 they could choose not to use that affiliate program. They could choose not to promote. And they still have something that's worth while, they still have an entire course, something they can use, something they will value from when, this case, is sitting up membership site for their $17 but what makes it cool? And this is just kind of like, it's, it's still, I think it's still in like, a good, like, white hat kind of area, but it's right there on the edge, but it's, it works so well, and it's so cool, because, in a way, your affiliate program, because you gave 100% and you recruited your buyers, now it kind of became viral. What I mean by that is, let's say that, you know, I sell this product on membership sites, and you buy it, and then you say, you see, well, okay, well, even if I just make a couple of sales, because you're giving away such a high percent of a commission, in this case, 100% then even if I get a couple of sales, I make a good amount of money. So I'm gonna, you know, mail this to my list, put it in my follow up sequence, put up my fan page, and then you make a couple of sales, and then out of, say, you make three or four sales, one of those buyers ends up promoting, and it kind of grows and grows and grows, you see what I'm saying. And so this is a way to get sales consistently, get, you know, leads consistently. And just to, you know, make a bunch of money, a bunch of subscribers quickly. But whenever we mentioned there's 100% commission affiliate program idea, and we get a few, you know, people kind of saying, Well, I'm not so sure. And here's, let me just diffuse everything for you right now. Number one thing that we hear about 100% affiliate program is, what if someone defrauds me, right? What if someone goes in and they they buy 100 different copies from 100 different accounts, and they refund them all, and now they've stolen a bunch of money, and now I'm a negative money, and I just want to tell you that doesn't happen. I would say, in the past five years. One person kind of tried, but then we talked to we talked to PayPal, and we just refunded all the all the transactions. So that's the first thing is, is someone going to abuse the system? Are they going to defraud it? The answer is no. And actually, now the platform to sell with this 100% commission affiliate program is called rapid action profits, R, A, P, and it actually has a lot of built in fraud. And if they see that the the sale looks a little fishy, like if the person who bought and the affiliate look like they have the same name or in this or the email address is the same, they will actually deny access to your digital product, and they can just go refund themselves. So fraud non existent. The other issue is if someone legitimately wants a refund, because the tricky part here is that the money doesn't hit your account. Okay, if I sell a product with 100% commission and you recommend to someone else, they pay you directly. This one's through Rob reduction profits and PayPal. They hit your PayPal account directly. And the thing about digital products is that we have to provide a refund period. It's pretty much just the way it ends up working out, and we provide a 30 day refund period. So for any reason. If someone just doesn't like their digital product, they can they can get their money back. If you end up not using it, if you use it, you don't get the results you wanted, whatever it is, you can get a refund. And so the problem is, okay, if I'm the seller and you're the affiliate, and then the buyer buys directly through you, and they want their money back, well, I can't click that button, right? I have to say, go over to that affiliate and refund their money. I have to go and tell you to refund the buyer. And so then people worry, well, what if my affiliates don't do that? Well, usually they do. I mean, first of all, refunds are pretty rare, and it pretty rare instance in the first place with PayPal, at least with me, it's under 1% with ClickBank, it's around five to 10% just because of the quality of buyer, you get, some buyers will buy with the intention of refunding. That's just how it is. But in this case, I mean various people refund, and if they do refund, well then talking to the affiliate, if they want to maintain a legitimate business, they'll just refund. Right? So most of the time, people won't refund, but in the off chance they do, we can talk to the affiliate, and chances are they will refund. Now let's just say that the affiliates being difficult or they won't refund. Well, we can talk to them and say, if you don't refund this person, then you will be removed from our affiliate program, and now you will not get credit on any future sales. You can't you can't sell through us. You can't sell our product. And usually that will do it, and if that doesn't do it, then we just tell the buyer to open up a dispute directly with PayPal, and then PayPal will investigate it and usually refund but so the refund issue is it's, I mean, first of all, it's a very, very rare instance, but if there is, then we can either talk to that, we can first talk to the affiliate, threaten to remove them, and then they won't get any more sales from us, and then finally, open a dispute with PayPal. So that is a non issue as well. Now the final one with 100% affiliate, 100% commission affiliate programs. Is, well, how do I make any money? You know, like so in this, in this issue, when we talked about making almost $102,000 in sales in 80 Days, well, most of that was just given away. Most of that money went to the affiliates. And so you're thinking, Well, I'm not running a charity here. Why should I, if I make my $7 my $17 sale, why should I give all that money away? And well, the answer to that is in the upsell. And that what's really interesting is that when this whole $7 product idea first came out, people didn't like it, but then when they heard that, okay, well, the idea is that I get someone to buy my $7 product, and if they like that, then they'll buy my $30 video, course, and then, and so it's all about the upsell, right? And so, you know, I know some people who they don't like the idea of selling something for $7 and my answer to that is, well, figure out. I mean, there's something you could sell for $7 take a piece out of one of your courses and sell that piece for $7 and after they buy that, they can buy the rest of the course for $30 for $97 and they don't necessarily have to buy it right away. It doesn't have to be a one time offer. You can just get them on your list and then give them something else to buy later on. And so

Robert Plank 19:41 what's really important about this whole upsell idea is that you are in control of what money you give to your affiliates or not. And here's what I mean is I used to run an affiliate program on Clickbank. I think so I had my commission at 60% and. I would give my affiliates what we call both the front end and the back end, right? So if someone bought a $17 product from me, the affiliate would get 60% and then if someone bought a 190 $7 product from me, the affiliate would also get 60% and you know what? Honestly, I didn't mind, because the thing to remember with affiliate sales is that's a sale that you would not have earned otherwise someone wrote a blog post about you, paid for some ads sent to their mailing list. They brought you a buyer, and otherwise you would have had $0 right? So, so in the past, I'd give a percentage for both the front end and for the back end up sell. And the way to do it with 100% affiliate commission program is just to not give the Commission on the back end. So you sell a $7 product, you have 100% commission, and then if the upsell is even something like $47 then you just give 0% that is not part of your affiliate program. And you know what? The kind of people who promote $7 products, not all, but quite a few like the whole $7 idea, because they're terrified of the thought of trying to earn a $500 $1,000 sale. And so this low ticket is great for them, because they can make a bunch of sales upfront, maybe their subscribers are trained for its low price point, and they get paid instantly because it's 100% commission. So let me ask you a question. If you make, say 100 sales at $7 and you give away 700 bucks, and then out of that 700 bucks, let's say that you make, say 14 so let's say 14% of your of your buyers end up buying your $50 product, right? Well, what ended up happening was you made 700 bucks on the front end, 700 bucks on the back end, and now you gave away that $700 on the front end, but you kept all of that $700 on the back end. So what do you really have? Well, in that case, you have a 50% affiliate program, because if you think about it, you gave away all the small, tiny sales, but you kept all the bake sales. And you know what? You built a list of buyers. And so for us to build, to get an extra 6770 people. At all in 80 Days. Is awesome. Is amazing. But to get 6770 people who are all buyers, who own credit cards, who are proven to be interested in this topic is huge. Is amazing. And by doing this over and over again, we've built a huge following and built a huge list. So when it comes time for us to launch something high ticket or recurring or a class, then those affiliates have already built our lists for us. So as we're winding this call down, the question is, how do you do this? Well, the first step is, I would sign up and put your 50 bucks in to clickbank.com and before doing anything else, fill in their little form and fill in what they call the pitch page, which is your sales letter. Fill in your price point, the commission. And for now on Clickbank give 60% or so. I mean, give away as much as you can. They might even let you go up to 75% but give away as much of that front end sale as you can, because they are building your list for you. So it might take a few days for Clickbank to approve you. You might have to change a few things, but once you're set up, then list your affiliate program, list a sign up link on your sales letter. And by the way, a great, easy way to make a sales letter is that paper template.com Now I told you that if you don't have your product for sale yet, then click Bank is a great way, because they will take the money, and then they will send your buyer to their download page, and then they will pay the affiliate, figure out the tax stuff, and then send you your money as now, if you're a little technical and you use a membership plug in, like WishList Member, well, WishList Member integrates with ClickBank, so you're on the right track there. And now, once you have that affiliate program set up, then on that web page, we should owe people how to sign up to your affiliate program. You add what's called a solo ad, right? A solo advertisement, the email that you sent to sell the product in the first place. That way, someone can just register as one of your affiliates, grab that, that text document, paste it in their autoresponder, and now they've made some money, or put it in there at a new blog post, and now they've made some sales. Go to $20 banners and get a few graphics made. And I think it's called the arm and Morin package, or the secret PPC package, but there's a package for about $127 maybe, where you can get banners made in the most common sizes for blog posts, and just link to your affiliate program from everywhere. Inside of your product, in your pre sale, follow up sequence in your post sale. Follow up sequence, link to it on your download page. Link to it on your sales. That are because so few people do. And now, if you want to get really crazy, now I'm not giving you choices. I'm saying first set it up on Clickbank so that you have some kind of an affiliate program, and then now go up to the next level and sell in this additional marketplace as well, because there's no rule that says you can't sell on a Click Bank and sell on PayPal and sell anywhere else that you want. These are just different storefronts where you are selling your own product. So you set up, you sell through PayPal, you probably have a PayPal account, but if you don't sign up for a seller account@paypal.com

Robert Plank 25:42 and then there are a few plugins that you have to install. And if you go to Setup and affiliate program.com you can see how to do that. We have a whole course view on that, but there's this script called rapid action profits, and you can install that, and that will allow you to give away 100% commission, and that will allow your affiliates to to make sales, and for you to see all the different sales right there. And I'm pretty sure that your affiliates can track everything in there, so they can say, I've made 100 clicks. I've got 20 sales, and that's the end of it. And inside, set up an affiliate program. We show you how to customize all the different things, like how to customize the sales letter, how to customize the welcome emails, how to customize the affiliate sign up page, because then you put all your tools right there in your rapid action profits area, so that people can can grab their solo ads, their banners and all that good stuff they have add on, even for WishList Member. So if you happen to have a membership site like Lance and I do to to manage all these 1000s of sales, well, then you can make it all work together in that system, and then at that point, it's just a matter of joining affiliate networks and then going out and getting affiliates. Now, what are affiliate networks? Well, they're just places where people who promote things as affiliates all sign up. So some big ones are, well, first of all, one is wrap bank, R, A, P, B, A, N, K, and I think there's some kind of a fee there, but you can, you can spend a certain fee and get a plug in. And now your product that's being sold for 100% commission can now be listed on this special site. And I think we put our set of an affiliate program product there, and without even realizing, we made like an extra 12,000 sale, or $12,000 in sales or so, just by act, just by being listed in a different marketplace. There's another affiliate network called WSO, plus, if you're in the internet marketing space, another affiliate network called JVZoo, if you're in the internet marketing space, another affiliate network called pay.com and you know what? I'll be honest, there have been people who have bought what are called resale rights from me and taken my exact same product, put it up online somewhere else, and joined one of these extra affiliate networks and made 1000s of dollars in sales just by being listed. But you need to figure out by looking at your competitors, where they're all selling, what affiliate system are they using? And is that an affiliate director where you can be listed? So once you're listed in these affiliate networks, it's time to go up there and get affiliates. Contact your own subscribers, contact other people who might have, might have been competitors, or people who maybe have a complimentary offer where you can put a special link on their blog, on their download page, on their unsubscribe page, in their members area, in their product. There are all kinds of possibilities here. Now, if you have any like viral reports or extra videos to give your affiliates that can't hurt as well. Rap has a plug in called the cookie jar add on where you can actually set up, for example, a video or a webinar replay page and make it so that affiliates can send traffic directly to a special page and still get cookied or credited as an affiliate. It also helps to know your numbers. So if you can track your conversion rate, and it could be as simple as going in your cPanel, checking out your aw stats area, looking at how many people came to your website this month, look at how many sales you made this month, and divide the number of sales by the number of visitors. If you want to get even fancier, you can get a free Google Analytics account and figure out your conversion rate. So now you can tell your affiliates that this particular sales letter converts at 10% and sells at $7 and just by you knowing your numbers will get you an extra number of affiliates a. With being listed in these marketplaces, along with giving people these extra tools, and you know what, you need to go after people. And that means that if you can contact your best affiliates, or contact any affiliates and see if they can get on the phone with you for a 20 minute interview that you will record using Skype and Camtasia, if you know how to do that, then great, now you can help them generate content for their blog, for their site, and in return, well, at the end, you can pitch your product. When Lance and I set up a new 100% commission site, we will make a bunch of sales in a short amount of time, we will launch the product in the proper way. Lead up for about a week to a one hour free webinar and demonstrate a few things. At the end, tell people to go and buy at this special address. We'll email our list until people go and buy at this special address, all to get in a bunch of sales and then show people this is a hot product. Because, yes, we did have an a bunch of extra subscribers. But even with that, we got so many people to buy our product that it's a hot seller right now. So that's about it for me today. I mean, I don't necessarily know your business personally. I don't know your niche personally. I don't know your idea or your product. So obviously, I don't have a crystal ball. I can't guarantee that you'll make a flood of sales, just like Lance and I do whenever we want to run a big affiliate promotion, but what's important is getting all of this set up. I don't want you to get overwhelmed with a bunch of choices or decisions, like, Should I run contests for affiliates? Should I give away prizes? Just get the thing set up. Get a click bank account, and that will get you listed in the Click Bank marketplace. Get registered in these other affiliate networks, if it applies to you in your niche, and make those extra sales. Because if you only make a handful of extra sales this month, and you end up giving away all that front end commission, those are still people that are on your subscriber list who you would not have come in contact with otherwise. And how about this over the course of the next year? Could you meet people? Could you meet potential affiliates for 100 interviews? That might sound like a lot, but that's just about two per week and one. If every one of those interviews, over time, even got you about 10 extra sales that I don't even know what price point, $7 $100 $500 $1,000 whatever you want, even a monthly recurring item. But if, if one of those interviews gave you an extra 10 measly sales. Then now you've made 1000 sales of your product extra this year. That means 1000 new people, subscribers, buyers, people who might buy again, whatever you want to call it, you'd be an idiot to pass that up. Anyway. That's all for me. I'm Robert Plank. Go ahead and like us at the Robert Plank show and find out how to set up an affiliate program at setup and affiliate program.com tune in next time for episode 13, how to create and sell software on the internet. I'll talk to you very, very soon. And thank you.