There’s one way to monetize your podcast that is both extremely effective and, in my opinion, is the most underutilized, underrated, underappreciated form of marketing out there. It’s affiliate marketing, and there’s so many different reasons why I think podcasters, bloggers, vloggers, and more should be getting into it.
For one thing, even if you don’t necessarily have the traffic to make money hand over fist now, any time you spend promoting a product is evergreen. In other words, once you build that audience and they’re looking for more of your content, they’ll come across your demo video or blog post and still be able to click through. Future you, who has the following you know you can build, can always point back to that evergreen content. It’s true passive income in the sense that once the traffic starts coming in, all you have to do is watch the commissions roll in.
Even more importantly, there are just so many opportunities out there for affiliate marketing opportunities. I’ve done it myself with a number of different products, including with ConvertKit—and yes, that’s an affiliate link so I’ll receive compensation if you make a purchase. It’s the tool I used to build my 100 Email Challenge, which started as a live event but now is an evergreen course. Once you have those first one hundred subscribers, I recommend a tool like ConvertKit to help manage that, but you can see how I’m offering value independent of the affiliate marketing I’m doing. [Full Disclosure: I am a compensated advisor and affiliate for ConvertKit.]
This episode offers a lot of high-level strategies for affiliate marketing, and I walk you through some examples of how I’ve used them in my own business and content. If you want to go deeper, first check out our free guide, SPI’s Epic Guide to Affiliate Marketing. This will help you determine if affiliate marketing is right for your business and give you the basics on how to get started. When you’re ready to go deeper, or if you would benefit from a supportive community, then I’d recommend my course, 1·2·3 Affiliate Marketing. This course will help you take the next steps to create new profit streams from your content, and maybe even develop those relationships to get gear or other freebies. Start with these five tips, and see how they work for you.
Pat Flynn: Today on the Smart Passive Income Podcast, I’m going to teach you five different ways that you can generate more income through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is recommending and sharing other people or other companies’ products, and when a person clicks on your link for that product and makes a purchase, you get a little bit of a kickback, a little bit of a commission. I teach affiliate marketing in my course, 123 Affiliate Marketing, and I’m going to share some higher level strategies that have worked for me over the past year. No matter what level you’re at, you’ll be able to implement these things and make more money. And the biggest thing is, there’s a lot of challenges with affiliate marketing. It’s not your product, so you have to work a little bit harder to earn that trust between the product and the audience that you’re building.
Pat Flynn: And honestly, it doesn’t matter what level you’re at, even if you’re just getting started and you don’t have an audience yet. What you’re doing here is you’re learning how to plant seeds. You’re planting seeds so that even if nobody’s on your website or listening to your podcast or watching your videos right now, eventually when they do, guess what? Those seeds have already been planted and you’ll be able to, hopefully, get those recommendations in front of people and portray them in a way that will get a person to click through and boom, make more money. So, that’s what this is all about. Doing it in an authentic way where everybody wins such that even if it’s not your product, you’re recommending it, you’re getting paid, and you’re getting thanked at the same time. Everybody wins.
Pat Flynn: Let’s make it happen. Stick around. It’s going to be awesome.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Smart Passive Income podcast where it’s all about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he’s pretty sure his son’s going to be taller and definitely more handsome than him, Pat Flynn.
Pat Flynn: What’s up team Flynn? Thank you so much for joining me today in episode 398 of the Smart Passive Income podcast. Whew. We’re closing in at the end of the year here, which is really amazing. And as a result of that, I wanted to give you some high level strategies, especially as we come up to the holiday season and into 2020 that you can implant and implement for your website, your podcast, your YouTube channel, wherever you have the ability to share things with others, you have the ability to become a pro affiliate marketer. And I teach this stuff in my course, 123 Affiliate Marketing, but these are some tips that you could use right now. And we’re just going to get started right away with tip number one. And this is for those of you who have a platform, and again, even if you don’t have any traffic to it, it’s something that can benefit you as you start to gain more traffic, as you start to build a following, as you begin to build those super fans.
Pat Flynn: So tip number one here is to interview or ask questions of the founder of this product. So this is best for those of you who have a podcast or a YouTube channel. But even if you don’t, even if you just have a website or even just a social media following. By getting information from the founder, what you’re doing is you’re building trust between the audience that you are building and the product owner. That’s one of the difficult things about affiliate marketing is it’s not your product. So yes, selling your own products is great. You can make more money because it’s your product. You don’t have to share any of that commission. The benefit of affiliate marketing is you can promote products that you could never create yourself or just don’t have time to create, which is why I recommend affiliate marketing as the number one way to generate an income, especially if you’re just starting out because your products can come later. You can be an affiliate first. Just like I was for years before I finally created my own product.
Pat Flynn: But anyway, like I was saying, you’re helping to build trust between the audience and the product. And so to do that, just interview the founder. So if you have a podcast, this is best. Because what you can do is you can utilize the platform that you’re building just like the one I’m doing right here to bring the person on the show. They’re more likely to say yes, especially if you promote it as, “Hey, I’m going to talk about your product.” But the big tip here is you don’t want to have this person come on and just pitch to your audience. That’s actually going to be a turn off. What you want to do is very similar to what I did with Nathan Barry who came on the podcast. We’ll have all the links and show notes to each of these things that I’m going to talk about in today’s episode on the show notes page at smartpassiveincome.com/session395. Once again, smartpassiveincome.com/session395.
Pat Flynn: But I believe it was episode 275 where I interviewed Nathan Barry, founder of ConvertKit. ConvertKit is an email service provider that I love, I use a lot, and I recommend. I’m also an advisor for the company as well. Full disclosure and yes, like I said, I’m an affiliate. So number one, you just need to make sure you’re always disclosing your affiliate relationship whenever you promote something. But I interviewed Nathan Barry on the show, not to bring him on to talk about how great the product is, how to use it, some of the cool things that are coming out. Those things kind of came out naturally on the episode, but I invited him on to talk about the story of ConvertKit. Why was it created, why did he just stop writing on his blog, and helping designers like he was known for, and start creating his own email service provider?
Pat Flynn: He talked about how we bootstrapped it. He told some amazing stories about how he almost gave up. He was working on it for years. Some advice that he got from people who were just like, “Hey, you should just give this up because you’re not dedicating yourself full time to it.” In which case he dropped everything else and went full time with it. And now it has recently been … actually in 2019, it was voted top software company in the Inc. 500, I think, or Inc. 5,000, or whatever the thing is. It was just like the fastest growing software company in the US and it was just a really cool feat. And in the podcast episode he was on, which was a while back before that nomination and before that award, he just talked about the whole story.
Pat Flynn: And the cool thing about story, when you can pull these stories out from these product owners, then it becomes not about the product anymore. It becomes about the person behind it, the culture behind the company, and the story behind it. Very similar to like when you go to a factory tour, right? You’re seeing the behind the scenes, you’re getting to know the story, the history behind the product, and that just makes you fall in love with the product even more.
Pat Flynn: So if you were at all on the fence of getting that product, well you’re likely going to be more interested in it because you hear about that story. And if you are a user, it’s just going to make you more of a fan, so that’s tip number one. Interview the founder. Highlight or spotlight them in some way, shape or form, and not get information about the product and how great it was. Yes, you should have demo videos and things like that for that, but really you need to want to collect the story and really get into the why behind the product and that is something that you can use time and time again, even in the future when you begin to mention that product even more. Just like whenever I create a video that mentions ConvertKit or talk about it on a podcast episode or highlight it on my website, I always reference that beginner story of Nathan’s and how ConvertKit was bootstrapped and how it was formed. It just becomes an amazing thing to help build trust between yourself and the audience.
Pat Flynn: Now I’ve given away tip number two here or I mentioned it. But tip number two here is to create a demo video for the products that you are promoting as an affiliate. And the word demo is really important. You’re not creating a complete how to with every button, every feature video. That can come later or perhaps live behind a paywall somewhere where you really go into detail about how to use a product. But when a person is deciding to buy something, they’re not wanting to see every single feature. What are they wanting? They’re wanting to know how this thing is going to help them. So when you create your demo videos that can also live on YouTube, and as a side benefit gets you some organic traffic as well, what you want to do is to show people maybe the top two or three features. But on top of that, show them how this thing works and how easy it is to use and how it’s helped you. The proof behind it.
Pat Flynn: And again, letting people see a glimpse of what it’s like to use this thing. Whether it’s a physical product or an online product or a course of some kind, doesn’t matter. You can show people what it’s like before they get it. Because that’s exactly what people want. It’s exactly why these YouTube channels out there are so popular, the ones that sort of unbox things ahead of time because people go there and they do research to see, well what’s it going to be like when I use this thing? Or is this even something I want to use? Is this going to be easy or difficult to use? Show me what my life is like after I use it. Those are the kinds of things you want to show people in your demo videos. And again, demo video. Demonstrate the use of this product and how it can help them.
Pat Flynn: So there’s a lot more nuances to creating a demo video, especially putting it onto YouTube. We have a lot of great YouTube podcasts with guests like Roberto Blake, Amy Landino, Sean Cannell, who’ve all been on the show before, who have some amazing advice for those of you who, if you’re starting a YouTube channel, you’ll definitely want to follow. So again, we’ll add those links to those episodes in the past in the show notes for this particular episode, smartpassiveincome.com/session395. And that the YouTube stuff on top of creating something that helps people see what they’re going to get before they get it is a winning combo for your affiliate promotions.
Pat Flynn: And of course those videos can live and be perfect for whenever you mentioned it your website. Oh, by the way, if you want to know more about this video and how to use it and how it’s going to help you, well here it is. Or more about this product and how it’s going to help you, here’s a link to it. And again, what we’re building is just an arsenal of stuff that will eventually convince a person that, whoa, okay, this of all the choices I have, is the one I need, and because you’re the one recommending it and you have the links right there and you’re providing value at the same time, boom, they’re going to click on your link and there you go.
Pat Flynn: All right, tip number three or weapon number three if you will, for affiliate marketing is challenging the objections. And I want to put quotations around that word challenge because really that’s what we’re creating here. Number three is you want to create a challenge related to the objections that people have about why this product wouldn’t help them or why they can’t even get started with it. And I’m going to go back to the ConvertKit example that I just mentioned because really this is the best example.
Pat Flynn: Man, the ConvertKit promotion … the amazing thing about ConvertKit, and this is not usual, but some products will pay you recurring affiliate income as people continue to pay monthly, and ConvertKit is one that does that. Very common in the email space because they want to encourage people to stay as a subscriber. And so ConvertKit’s not unique in that case, but it is a unique situation in terms of most things that you can promote as an affiliate. I mean, most things you promote as an affiliate are just one time deals and you get paid one time for it, but there are some cases where you can get paid recurring and that’s like the holy grail of affiliate marketing and ConvertKit although it’s a 30% commission base for people that you send through, it’s a 30% commission as long as they stay on as a subscriber. So if you are a ConvertKit user and you love it, maybe you should be promoting it to your audience too because it’s really, really great.
Pat Flynn: Anyway, I am an affiliate for it and one thing that I’ve done to help myself promote ConvertKit as an affiliate is set up a challenge. Now, I did this live once, but then it’s been automated since, it’s been evergreen since meaning I don’t have to lift a finger and it still continues to work for me. It was definitely something that made a bigger splash when it was live because it was number one, first time, but number two, it felt like an event. Since then, it’s just been an automated thing that I mentioned every once in a while.
Pat Flynn: So what am I talking about? I’m talking about the 100 email challenge. If you don’t know what this is, you can check out 100emails.com. You’ll see it in the automated form. However, when it was launched live, it kind of worked like this. So I made a big event about it and I said, “Hey guys, on this date, on this particular date, we’re all going to do this challenge together. We’re going to help you, if you’re getting started with email, collect your first 100 email subscribers.” And this is a big objection. People think in their head, “Oh I can’t do that. I can’t even get a hundred emails. So why would I even need an email marketing service provider?” And I want you to think about the objections that your audience has about the things that they need to do. My audience, I know they need to build an email list and there’s a lot of objections. I can’t do this. How do I even get started? I don’t even know. Throughout this entire challenge, mind you, that there is no promotion for ConvertKit.
Pat Flynn: That’s phase two or step two. Step one is, hey, let’s just get your hundred emails. And the reason it’s a hundred is because it’s doable. If I were to say, “Hey guys, we’re going to do a 100,000 email challenge,” the likelihood of people going, “Okay, I can do that and it’s something I’m going to achieve,” is very unlikely. But a hundred emails within a 72 hour period, definitely doable. And the fact that it was done live and it was an event and it was like, “Okay guys, on this date we’re going to focus for 72 hours.” It’s more possible. It’s more doable. People will make time in their calendar and honor that if it’s just within a short time period and it’s something achievable. Even a thousand is a lot, but a hundred, hey, we could do that. That’s doable. Maybe it’s possible. We’ll, I’ll sign up and see what Pat has to share with me.
Pat Flynn: So the challenge works like this, you sign up to the waitlist to get the announcement date, and of course everybody knew that the date was a particular date. I can’t remember the specific date. This was back in 2017 actually. But the challenge happened on a specific day. People signed up knowing that was the day I asked people to block time in their calendar for that 72 hour period to do just one hour a day, the stuff that I was going to share during this period.
Pat Flynn: So then the day happened and I sent an email with some instructions, which had the tips and the strategies and then the next day, day two, another email with the tips and the strategies and then day three came and there was another email. The emails were written ahead of time. This was a challenge that was just done specifically through ConvertKit, which was my email service provider although it could actually be done through anything. And the fact that it was done with ConvertKit had nothing to do with the affiliate promotion. That’s just, again, like I said, step two.
Pat Flynn: But the mechanism that this challenge was delivered was via email. The emails were written ahead of time to teach people how to get their first 100 email subscribers and by day three … and because it was live there was also a Facebook group that was done kind of along with this that was created along with this. It’s since died out and I closed it because then I wasn’t doing this live anymore. But when it was live using the Facebook group to help support the crew and also to have them support each other, it was amazing.
Pat Flynn: We had 14,000 people sign up. And honestly, I got to do this challenge live again because it was just so successful. We had 14,000 people sign up and they all received those emails on day one, day two, and day three. And in the group they were sharing their wins by day one, some people already had a hundred emails. By day three, some people had even closed over a thousand emails, which is really cool. And again, and no mention of ConvertKit during this process. ConvertKit was just the mechanism by which I was delivering the challenge.
Pat Flynn: And then after the three days it was, hey guys, for those of you who enjoyed this challenge and now see the power of email marketing and can see that you can do it now. Because remember we were tackling those objections. A challenge is an amazing way to help people get over those objections. Well, it was a logical next step. Now you need a place to put all these emails so that you can legally and more conveniently send out mass emails, broadcast, or create an autoresponder list and communicate passively with your audience through your email service provider. And I recommend ConvertKit. Here’s a demo video, going back to tip number two, strategy number two, that will show you how easy it is to use. And I worked out a deal with ConvertKit at this time to have an extended trial. So this is another thing that you can do and this is actually tip number four.
Pat Flynn: Tip number four here, relates to the fact that as you begin to start promoting something more and more, and even if you haven’t done that already, if you have some plans and a strategy like this challenge to better promote a product than you would normally just by putting it on a website and kind of letting it sit. A lot of companies are excited that you are going to do something like a challenge or giveaway or some other big promotional mechanism to promote their product. They are likely, not always, but they are likely to hook you up in all different kinds of ways.
Pat Flynn: They might hook you up with, very similar to what ConvertKit did, an extended free trial that was just exclusive for me and this challenge. And that was a really cool thing that they wanted to do because they wanted to reward the users here, but it also obviously supported them. Because when I told people at the end of the challenge, “Hey guys, this is a exclusive deal that you can get with ConvertKit right here. This expires on this date.” Well then they’re going to jump to the chance to do it because it’s going away. By the way, the evergreen 100emails.com challenge, because it’s email, it’s just automated at this point. But there’s no Facebook group and there’s no special deal at the end, but there is still a way to get into ConvertKit, which is email number four that goes after the three days, so if you want to check that out and you actually want to get challenged to get a hundred emails within 72 hours, go to 100emails.com.
Pat Flynn: Okay. Going back to strategy number four here, which is work out deals with these companies that you’re promoting. Again, not always possible, but number two, you don’t know what’s possible until you ask. That’s the big thing. A lot of people in my courses, a lot of students in 123 Affiliate Marketing, this is actually one of the lessons is to go and reach out to these companies no matter how much or how little you’ve promoted these companies in the past. And you’re going to get these companies to hook you up.
Pat Flynn: And like I said, they can hook you up with exclusive deals or coupon codes for your audience. Number two, they can hook you up with free items, which happens very often. Less so in the software space because it’s, well, software and likely you are already using these products and if not you can ask. There’s no harm in asking if you have a promotional plan in place. A lot of companies get excited about that because they know just how valuable that authority that you’ve built is and that trust that you have with your audience is, but they could hook you up with some free stuff.
Pat Flynn: I went to … where did I go? I went to Las Vegas with Caleb, my videographer for NAB, the National Association of Broadcasters’ giant conference. There’s literally 100,000 people and it was at the convention center and it was huge. And I’ve never flexed this muscle before, but knowing in YouTube I was going to do a lot of podcasting stuff in this year and next year for sure. We’re building out this studio. We wanted to connect with companies. I never flexed this muscle before, but I did and I went into NAB purposefully to make partnerships with companies and see if they would even be interested in sending me free stuff so that I could use it in my studio, but obviously talk about it on my videos and on my podcast.
Pat Flynn: And so I went up to different booths that had products and interesting products that I would use for my YouTube channel and for my podcasting studio and my video studio here in San Diego. Big shout out to WeWork by the way, which is where I’m recording this podcast episode right now, actually using some of the free stuff that was given to me. I’m literally on a Heil PR40 microphone right now. I’ve used a Heil before, I bought one for my home studio. And I met Heil, and Michelle and the team over there at Heil and I was like, “Hey guys, I’m building out this new studio, my old studio in February. It was broken into a lot of my stuff got stolen. I’m building a brand new one at the WeWork in San Diego. What do you say? I’ll share you guys and some videos. If you wanted to hook me up with some microphones for the studio.” And they were like, “Pat, we’d absolutely love to do that.”
Pat Flynn: And they sent over four Heil PR40 microphones. Because I have my solo setup and then I have a setup where I’m going to be potentially interviewing people in a video format but at a table. So there might be up to three or four people being recorded at the same time and they were happy to do that. And it was like, whoa. Was it really that easy? Obviously it helps that I have a YouTube channel and I’m known for podcasting, but even if I wasn’t, there’s a lot of smaller people in this space that are also getting hooked up and a lot of times they go, “Okay, well do a couple of videos first then we’ll see.”
Pat Flynn: It’s not as easy as just asking from scratch, just to kind of put that in perspective. I have been building my YouTube channel for a while. A lot of people know me in the podcasting space so I flex that muscle, but hey, you know what? Even if you have a little bit of sales for a product, you can still ask. It’s worth asking because you might not know what might be sent to you. I have a lot of my students who were sent cameras and a lot of other hardware products as a result of just literally asking. And they were just starting their affiliate marketing game, which is really awesome.
Pat Flynn: Anyway, then I went over to Rode and met the people over at Rode. They’re an Australian company, which was cool and they have a lot of cool things like the Rodecaster Pro, which was just coming out at the time. And they said, “Hey Pat, I know you have this …” or actually I told them the story and they were like, “Well, would you like to use a Rodecaster Pro?” And I was like, “Sure, I’d love one.” And they were like, all right, “We’ll send one to you.” I was fully expecting to pay for it, but they sent one over and I’ve been mentioning it a lot on my stories and on my YouTube channel. We’re doing a full series of videos because it is literally the best box that I’ve ever seen in a while. And here I am mentioning it here too, but the Rodecaster Pro is legit. I’m recording on it right now. It’s allowing me to do some fun things like this. Big shout out to Rode.
Pat Flynn: So it’s not just a sound panel where I can put some sound effects and stuff like if I said a funny joke … okay that was the wrong button. But that was a not so funny joke. But anyway, it’s not just a sound pad but I can record up to four XLR inputs and literally it does all the fancy stuff that my connection at home does with the different boxes. But it’s all-in-one, like the de-esser, the compressor, the leveler, the noise gate, all this stuff is all built into it. It’s literally game changing for podcasters and I can tap in my phone via Bluetooth. So if I wanted to connect a Skype call, I could record that, but it’s on my phone and it’s not even wired. It’s amazing. Anyway, enough of that.
Pat Flynn: I went around and found some other companies. Roland had a really cool switcher that we might be using for some live streaming stuff. This is just really cool. You have the ability to do that because you have a platform where you will be sharing this and I mean these companies spend loads of money on ads to get in front of cold audiences. They know how valuable a warm audience is and they use influencers, big and small, to help support their business. And you can use that to your advantage to support your business too.
Pat Flynn: So yeah, reach out to those companies no matter how big or small you are, it doesn’t hurt to ask. If you get a rejection, that’s okay. It just should hopefully motivate you, number one, to get to that point. But also you can follow up and say, “Hey, you know what? It’s okay. I’ll reach back out to you. At what point would you be willing to work with me on this partnership?” And you might get a very specific response, which will help you even more. “Oh, it’s when you get to 1,000 YouTube subscribers.” All right, now you know you’re going to get to 1,000, you know what to shoot for. And you know when you hit there you’re going to reach back out to them and they’re going to go, “Whoa, you actually did it. Thank you. Now we’re going to work with you.” And there’s an email string where they said that. So they’re going to be more likely to take you up on your word. So that’s tip number four. Reach out to the company and ask.
Pat Flynn: Actually, the third thing that they might hook you up with is literally a higher commission. I’ve had a few companies want to make sure that I stay on as an affiliate and we’ve been doing a lot more volume for them. When you do a lot more volume for a company, this is down the road, then you have the ability to ask them for more money, like literally. And the worst thing that can happen is they’ll say no, but the way that you position this is, you don’t just want to ask. I mean you can and you could literally do this. You could just go, “Hey, I was wondering if you could increase the commission for my affiliate promotions for your product. We’ve been doing a lot of volume and I just wanted to see if that was possible.”
Pat Flynn: You can sometimes get a yes for that, it’s crazy, but secondly, you can position it in that you are going to be adding more resources. You’re likely building your business, you’re growing your team. You are maybe spending money on ads for your website and you want to help supplement that in a higher commission for the products that people are going to see from those efforts, can balance that out a little bit. And I’ve used that very successfully in the past as well with some of the companies that I’ve worked with who were happy to pay me more knowing that they were going to get even more money back because I was growing the business and I was supporting it in a way that would support them as a byproduct as well.
Pat Flynn: So just this episode is kind of a brain dump of some of these higher level tips. I do get into a lot more detail with these tips in my course 123 Affiliate Marketing, which by the time you listen to this, it may or may not be open, but usually there’s a way to get in. If you go to 123affiliatemarketing.com, you’ll see that and some of the curriculum there and how much deeper we go into this. A lot of great success stories coming out of that. A lot of students literally within a couple of weeks they just implement some of the strategies and it pays for itself, which is the whole the whole deal there.
Pat Flynn: Okay. And so to finish off, let’s talk about strategy number five here to help you with your affiliate marketing efforts and that is to teach the topic, share the tool. That’s the strategy. So you can teach the topic in many different ways. So what do I mean? Well an example is from way back in the day, I used to teach a lot of keyword research and there’s a lot of keyword research tools that I did use. I started with Market Samurai, then went over to Long Tail Pro. Now I recommend things like Ahrefs, which is fantastic. They’ve been on the show before.
Pat Flynn: Big shout out to Ahrefs, ahrefs.com. They didn’t sponsor this episode. I just want to give them a shout out because they’re great, as you should do with great companies. But obviously if there’s an affiliate opportunity that’s always great to add in as well. But yeah, Ahrefs is awesome.
Pat Flynn: But anyway, I used to teach keyword research and I used to actually do it in a number of ways. I would teach how to do keyword research on my website. I would teach how to do keyword research on YouTube. I would teach how to do keyword research in a live setting like a webinar and I would do that for free. Obviously the podcast … I didn’t even mention podcasts, but the blog and the YouTube videos were free and even the webinar was free to join in exchange for number one, that email address, but number two is just free information that they were getting.
Pat Flynn: They were getting my how-to, and I structured my how-to’s like this, “Hey guys, you want to do keyword research, here’s why to do it because it’ll help you understand what your audience is looking for, which helps you understand potentially what articles to write, what keywords to use in your articles in your paragraphs, what products to create.” Keyword research is fantastic, search engine optimization obviously. And then I taught the free way and then the headache-free way. That’s the big thing I talk about a lot. The free way to do it and then the headache-free way to do it. Because usually the free way to do it is going to cause a lot of headaches. And so I would show people for free. And this is the big way to kind of position yourself so it’s just not obviously seen as an affiliate promotion. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Pat Flynn: There’s nothing wrong with a promotion that is obviously an affiliate promotion. But this just made a juxtaposition between how difficult it was to do something for free and just the benefit and how much time you could save and the convenience that comes with buying one of these tools and getting access to it. So the cool thing is that you should absolutely do it this way. So you share the free way and it becomes something that is just, whoa, there’s a lot of steps, but you’re sharing it for free. So what can a person say? They can’t say anything wrong or bad about that because you’re sharing it for free. But then after that you obviously share, well the tools that you use. And I’ve done this several times and it works every single time. Because it’s just clear how much easier it is to use the tool.
Pat Flynn: And there’s really not much more to say beyond that. You can obviously share the demo video for that tool, or if you’re live on a webinar, just it’s even more impressive. So you want to grow your list, you want to share things with people that’s helpful. Let people know how to do it if they can’t afford it, but then also show people how much more convenient it is to use a particular tool. Well, there’s no better way than what I just told you. So the free way, plus the headache free way, and creating a lot of content that is along those lines will work wonders for you. So you’re getting started on your affiliate marketing journey in a way that you haven’t done it before. I mean, honestly for me, I believe that affiliate marketing is the most underutilized, underrated, underappreciated form of marketing out there. Yes, selling your products that you create yourself is fantastic, and that’s always what I recommend to get to.
Pat Flynn: But when you’re just starting out, especially or even if you started and all you have is your own products, why not supplement that with recommending products that you know that you just A, don’t have the time or cannot possibly create yourself? I couldn’t possibly, at this moment in my life, create a email service provider and I might as well promote the one that I use, the one that I love, the one that works great like ConvertKit. I have no ability to, at this time, create a content management system behind a login that accepts payments and allows for an affiliate program as well, which is why I love Teachable and I use it, and I recommend it as an affiliate. I often consider these products as if they were my own.
Pat Flynn: And that’s the sort of sixth bonus, I guess, and final tip for you is just to … whatever you promote, treat them as if they were your own. Even though they’re not, support them as if they were your own. Believe in them as if they were your own and treat them and highlight them as if they were your own. Because a link on a blog post or a single mention on a podcast episode is just not enough. There’s so many other things you can be doing to promote these products in a way that’s really going to show people why they need this in their life, where everybody can win.
Pat Flynn: The company wins because they get a new customer, you win because you get a commission, and your audience member wins because they’ve gotten something that they absolutely needed and they just needed you to give them a little push, a little bit of love to show them exactly why this thing was helpful. And I hope this podcast was helpful for you.
Pat Flynn: Thank you so much for listening in today. This is session 398 of the Smart Passive Income podcast closing in on 400 how amazing is that? We have a special episode coming up for episode 400. My top 400 tips, no that’s way too … that would be like a 24 hour podcast episode, which would be an interesting idea. I wonder what the world record is for a podcast episode.
Pat Flynn: Anyway, we’ll leave that for a future day and no, I’m not going to be talking about my top 400 lessons I’ve learned. There’s a way more than that, but I’m going to choose some of my favorite and share them in that episode. And then finally, make sure you hit subscribe if you haven’t already, because team Flynn, you’re amazing and I’m here to continue to support you and hope you enjoy this episode. Again, the show notes for this episode can be found at smartpassiveincome.com/session398. One more time. smartpassiveincome.com/session398. Cheers, take care. And as always, team Flynn for the win. Peace
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at www.smartpassiveincome.com.
