Our 6-Figure Affiliate Launch (When NOT To Promote Someone Else’s Content)
Episode 102: Show Notes
Boss babes, you are in for a treat today. We are doing what we normally do after a launch. We are giving you all the nitty gritty details you won’t hear anywhere else. You are going to hear about ad spend, what we did, what we didn’t do, how much we made, and all of what happened in our most recent launch, which happens to be an affiliate launch for someone else’s course (not even our own program), that we just wrapped up in July 2017. If you have no clue what we’re talking about, go back to some of our older podcasts and give them a listen.
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After having so much success with FB Everything, we thought it would be beneficial for our audience to hear how we went about doing an affiliate launch. We spent money on marketing someone else’s program and that’s what we’re going to talk about today, so if you’re even a tiny bit curious, keep listening!
Setting The Stage
We were affiliates for Courtney Foster Donahue. She followed a similar launch pattern to what we did with the challenge and it was a last referral** affiliate program. People would sign up to the free challenge and once they were in and saw the value of her teachings and courses, and through our nurturing, they would stick around for the 8 days and learn more about the program and decide if they wanted to buy it. There were also lots of things that took place days before the free challenge even started. The promotional period was a lot longer than just the 8 days!
Getting Ready For The Launch
We spent a lot of effort making sure this thing worked like gang busters. We had known in advance that we were only going to launch our products a couple of times throughout the rest of the year, which meant we weren’t launching anything of our own in July. That meant that we had a lot of room to really promote this and promote it hard. In order to get ready for it, we planned it as if it was a typical launch. The first thing we really tackled was email sequencing, what we wanted to say to these people and what video ads we wanted to put out. We had decided in advance that we were going to do three video ads and we planned this way more than we normally do. We wrote scripts, hired a videographer and production styled it.
All About The First Ad
The first ad we put out was to promote the challenge. The challenge was very similar to the one created for Strategy Academy. We put about 90% of our budget into promoting the challenge and getting people to sign up. We needed leads who were warm and, especially for this launch, we needed leads who not only knew us but also knew who Courtney was. We were still testing out how to market someone else’s thing. We really wanted people to see the value inside her challenge right off the bat. At the end of the day, our affiliate link got 2108 challenge sign ups over the course of 5/6 days. We were running the ad prior to the challenge starting and into the challenge itself. We had over 5000 clicks from our ad, we spent $4071.82 to get those 2100 sign ups. Be aware that we also had organic people coming in from our Facebook group, word of mouth and our email list received 3 emails.
Knowing When To Shut Up
The odd part of this, and the part we just had to learn, was that we had to not only get the people there, we had to keep them there and so had to shut up for a little bit. During Facebook on Fleek Week, Courtney was sending an email every day talking about Facebook and giving free value. We didn't want to disrupt that or throw people off, we wanted them to be engaging. Instead of us also sending an email and bombarding the people with information, we said nothing. We were active in her Facebook Group, and were relying on and going through the challenge ourselves. We were engaging as much as the rest of the people. We had to listen and engage where necessary and literally just shut up and wait till the cart opened. That’s when we flipped to our second ad.
All About The Second Ad
The second ad was also a video ad and this time, instead of doing a click-based ad, we focused on engagement. We really wanted to concentrate on some of the organic reach. We knew people were going to click on the sales page from all sorts of places, but at the end of the day, we knew we could also do retargeting at the final stages to get them over the edge. On our second ad, we spent $510.77 and we reached just under 30,000 engagements — people watching the video and seeing our content. That seems like a ton of people, but the reason why engagement has a higher reach is that it’s so much cheaper than a link-click. Our strategy was that we were just sending it to warm people, so folks who were already interested in us and in Courtney. We just wanted to be able to pop up into their newsfeed and remind them about what was happening and what was available.
Turning A Facebook Live Into An Ad
For our third ad, we decided to turn our Facebook Live Q&A with Courtney into an ad. For that engagement ad, we spent $68 and reached around 3000 people. We aren’t sure how much that helped, because it’s really hard to track conversions on this kind of ad. What we did notice was that while we were Live and shortly after going Live, we got around 10-15 sales. Going Live was definitely beneficial and that’s why decided to turn it into an ad. One thing though, is that it’s really hard to get people to go back and watch a Live that’s already over. You’re already dropping off engagement because they weren’t there in the moment and so it is going to perform a little differently, which is something that you’ll have to bear in mind.
Clicks Versus Conversions
When you’re an affiliate, Facebook pixels in sharing that kind of information. We would have to set up a custom audience for her site and if we had done that, we technically could have retargeted all of her traffic too. Which is getting weird and unethical. If you’re doing your own launch, we would highly suggest a retargeting ad that is conversion based for your cart close ad. We spent 10% of our budget on cart close ads on our last launch but we literally didn’t have another way to do it because of the nature of the beast. This was just how we had to go about it. We had to get traffic there, but we couldn’t see on the other end if they converted or not. In the future, you could create separate Facebook Pages for each of your affiliates, but that’s for a much bigger and much more intricate affiliate launch.
Quote This
If you provide amazing value for free, those people will pay attention when you ask them to pay for it
Highlights
Hear more about who we did the affiliate launch for and what it mostly consisted of. [0:04:55.0]
Find out what went into us getting ready for the launch. [0:05:55.0]
The first video ad we put out to promote the affiliate launch. [0:08:50.0]
Some lessons we learned during the launch process. [0:12:43.0]
The second video ad we put out to promote the affiliate launch. [0:14:00.0]
How we went about turning the Facebook Live Q&A with Courtney into our third ad. [0:18:00.0]
Why would you do clicks instead of conversions? [0:26:30.0]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Setting the stage, Getting ready for the launch, First ad, Knowing when to shut up, Second ad, Turning a Facebook live into an ad, Clicks versus conversions
