The Affiliate Guy Matt McWilliams – Advice for Affiliate Program Managers

For the right niches, yes. ClickBank pays 50% to 75% commissions on most digital products (some go higher), and any affiliate can sign up free with no approval wait. The catch: its open marketplace lets weak offers sit next to strong ones, so your reputation rides on vetting every product’s gravity, refund rate, and sales page before you promote it.

What is ClickBank ...

Promote a free assessment as an affiliate by taking it yourself, sharing your real result, and asking your audience to reply with theirs. That’s the email I sent affiliates for Michael Hyatt’s Free to Focus launch, opened with “I just finished taking…,” then backed by a day-one opt-in contest.

Here’s the exact move, in order. You take the assessment before you ask ...

Recruiting one affiliate costs $500 to $1,000 when the business owner does the work, under $50 when trained virtual assistants do it, and a monthly software fee when a tool handles discovery and outreach. Those numbers come from programs I’ve run, and they count time as money. The number to watch is cost per active affiliate, because most people who join a program never promo...

On a $1,997 course launch I ran, the baseline affiliate commission was about $800 a sale. A first-time affiliate made 23 sales and roughly $18,400. Two marketers with a list of 6,500 took second with close to $400,000 in sales. A different affiliate, in a different year of the same client’s launch, made 184 sales and won a $100,000 contest prize on top of commissions. These a...

When an affiliate becomes your competitor, don’t panic or cut them off in anger. Decide whether they can still promote you well, because a competitor is sometimes a great affiliate. Tighten your terms if there’s a real conflict, and protect your customer relationships either way.

You log in one morning and see it. One of your affiliates launched a product that look...