In my last Inner Circle, one of the last strategies I shared was on a topic that, surprisingly, still drives more than 50% of the traffic to ClickFunnels – Affiliate Marketing. Despite the buzz around Facebook, Google, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube ads, affiliate marketing remains a powerful and often overlooked strategy. I shared my insights and strategies on how to build a successful affiliate program, drawing from my personal experience and the journey of launching ClickFunnels.

In the early days, traffic generation was primarily through joint ventures and affiliate partnerships. This episode highlights how a properly managed affiliate strategy can significantly reduce the risks and costs associated with paid advertising. Plus, instead of paying upfront for ads, affiliate marketing allows you to pay only when a sale is made, making it a stress-free and efficient way to grow your business.

Key Highlights:

If you're looking to scale your business and cut down on advertising costs, this episode is packed with actionable advice to help you harness the power of affiliate marketing. Listen and learn how to leverage affiliate partnerships to drive traffic and sales effectively!

Again, our top five affiliates, none of these guys actually promote Clickfunnels. But all of them have some kind of training system, and we're plugged into every one of their training systems where day 3 or day 10, they're telling the people they need a funnel and then they give them a Clickfunnels share funnel, and we're the ones plugged in there. And so it's like, these people, as their businesses grow, our businesses grows. And it's just the most beautiful thing in the world to figure how you can integrate into other people's businesses.

Russell Brunson:
What's up, everybody? I want to talk today about, it's so funny, there's so many ways we drive traffic, so many things we talk about. Everyone's always freaking out about Facebook ads and Google, Instagram, and YouTube. But, to this day, more than 50% of the traffic to ClickFunnels still comes from this one traffic source that we never talk about. At a recent event, I kind of went off on this, and I talked for, I don't know, 45 minutes or so talking about how to get traffic from affiliates, and what we're doing, and how it works. And it was funny to me, because we used to have this conversation back when I first got started. Because there wasn't Facebook, there wasn't Instagram, the way we all got traffic when we first got started was through affiliates. So all of our conversations, all the seminars, all the events were just talking about that one topic. And nowadays, I go to an event, and nobody's talking about it. Yet it's still the way that we use to drive the majority of our traffic, despite the fact we're spending a million dollars plus a month on paid ads.

And so I wanted to go deep with that, and just get your guys, the wheels in your heads, really spinning about how to use affiliates to start growing your companies, to drive more traffic, to get sales. The best thing about affiliates is that, with Zuckerberg, you buy ads. You give him money upfront whether people buy or not. With affiliates, the risk is on them. You convince them to promote, they promote. And if they make a sale, then you pay them a percentage of the sale. So there's no risk, there's no stress. It's such a better way to run and build and grow a business. So with that said, today we're going to dive deep into some strategies about building your own affiliate program and getting other people to promote your products and your services for you.

In the last decade, I went from being a startup entrepreneur to selling over a billion dollars in my own products and services online. This show is going to show you how to start, grow, and scale a business online. My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to The Marketing Secrets Podcast.
Okay. How many of you guys right now have an affiliate program inside of your businesses that's active? Okay. Interesting. How many of you guys do not? So we've got more of the do-nots than the do. Okay. All right. A couple of things. Number one is, back in the day, when I got started, 20-some-odd years ago, we didn't have Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. We didn't have any of those things, right? And it's funny, because I think back, how did we get traffic back then? The only thing we really had, we had email lists, their Google Ads, and that was about it.

And so usually what happened, people would buy Google Ads to build an email list, and then you'd promote each others' things. So 90% of the way we got traffic back 20 years ago was all us doing joint ventures. Like, that's what everything was, getting affiliates, calling people on the phone. Which me, as a super introverted person, who's number one fear on this planet is picking up the phone, I had to stretch to be able to do that. But it's the only way that we could grow our companies. And so I built a lot of relationships with people. And that's kind of how I kicked things off, it was doing a lot of joint ventures, where I'd promote their product, they'd promote ours, things like that.

Fast-forward then, whatever, 10, 12 years later, is when we launched Clickfunnels. And when we launched Clickfunnels, we did not do any advertising. We had no one on our team who knew advertising. We weren't running Facebook ads, none of that stuff. The only tool we had was joint ventures. And so, some of you guys had asked me how we structured things initially when we launched Clickfunnels, so I'll talk about that first. And then I'm going to go to the evolution of what we're doing that's really exciting. And this evolution, by the way, the whole goal of all the things I'm trying to do in my business right now are how do I do things where I can cut Zuckerberg off? And so the whole idea came from that, and now it's turned into something really, really cool I think you're going to love.

Okay, so when we first launched ClickFunnels, number one thing we did is, can you guess? The Dream 100. We did the Dream 100, just like I tell everyone over and over and over again. Did the Dream 100. And I was like, how do I get the information that we're launching this thing in front of people's faces? And so back then I'd seen somebody online who'd done a video card. Now they're kind of famous. Everyone did them. But no one had done them before. I saw it in some weird industry where someone had these video cards, where you have a message, you open it and the video starts playing. And so when we were launching ClickFunnels, it was like we need to do these video cards. And it was really hard because there's only one person I think in Hong Kong who was actually making these things. We found the company, and so we made it.

First thing we did is we did these video cards to our Dream 100. And that was how we kicked off awareness that we were launching a company called ClickFunnels. And that's how it started. And then, you guys have heard the story before, we launched it at first, where everyone's promoting a free trial, and it didn't really convert, and no one knew what ClickFunnels was, and it was confusing. We launched with affiliates. And the ones who promoted it, it just kind of died and they didn't do a lot. I'm like, dang it. And then fast-forward a few months later is when I had a chance to go an event. I wrote the webinar pitch for ClickFunnels. I did the webinar. It converted. And now we had a model. Anyway, I'm not going to go deep in the whole model. But you obviously know, webinar, Linchpin, all that kind of stuff. But we had a webinar.

So what we'd do is I'd go out there, I'd do the webinar. First, do it to our own list, made a bunch of money, and then I had the stats. It was like, hey, I did the webinar. We got a thousand people to register, we made X amount of dollars. Therefore, for everyone who registered, we made whatever the numbers were. And we had a little database of just like, here's what we made from this webinar. So then I had that, I was able to take that and I went to a joint venture partner, an affiliate. I'd say, "Hey, I just did this webinar to my list. I was able to get a thousand people to register. Here's the stats, here's the numbers. If you can get a thousand people, this is what you'll probably make." And so I tell them, "Based on these numbers, you might make $5 for everyone who registers for the webinar." Whatever the numbers were.

So I pitched it to somebody else. And if they liked it, like, "Oh, that sounds great, let's do the webinar." We set the webinar, they would promote it. I would do the webinar, they'd make a bunch of money. And then what happened? We'd take that and we add it to this document. There's like, here's the results from my webinar. Here's the results from the webinar I did with this person. And then I would go to that person and I told them, I was like, each of our partners would get 40% commission on the webinar, right? I said, "Hey, you just got 40% commission. Did it convert well for you?" They're like, "Yeah, it was amazing. People loved it. It converted great." I was like, "Awesome. We have a two tier affiliate program. So if you have anybody you know who would like to do this webinar, I'll pay you 10% of any of the sales that they make." And people were like, "This is amazing."

So then all of a sudden they would go and they would contact all their friends like, "Hey, I just did Russell's webinar. We made $6 for every registrant, dah-dah-dah, whatever the numbers were." They kind of bragged about it, and say, "Do you want to do a webinar with Russell?" And they would connect me with all these different people. So they might connect me with five different people. Those five people would come to me, and then I would do a webinar to them. So I did a webinar for that person's list, that person, that person. And the person who did the webinar got 40% commission, and the person who referred them got 10%. So everyone's happy.

Then I took the data from all those five webinars, I put it on the sheet. So-and-So's webinar, they got 300 registrants, we made $12 per lead, whatever. So we kept building out this document of just all the case studies of what happened. And then those five people, I'd ask the same question, "Hey, we have a two-tiered affiliate program. Do you have any friends who you think would want to promote this webinar?" And all of them do. People who do webinars know people who do webinars. And they're like, "Yeah, definitely. Here's three of my friends that should do the webinar." So they introduced me, they introduced me, they introduced me and they kept going and going and going.

And that's how I did 70 whatever webinars, live webinars, the first couple months of launching ClickFunnels, was that. That was the process and the path. Two-tiered affiliate program, 40% first tier commission, 10% second tier. And then we do a webinar, have success. Get their friends, do a webinar and just kept growing from there. Does that make sense? So that's how we launched ClickFunnels, how it started growing. We've paid out, I think over $150 million in affiliate commissions since ClickFunnels first launched. And that was kind of the initial process. So that hopefully gives you guys a couple ideas if you're running different affiliate programs.

All right, now there's like three or four things that make this last thing make sense. So they may seem disconnected, as I tell you three stories, but at the very end, I promise it'll tie together just like a nice bow. Okay, number two. When I reopened Inner Circle the very first time, like three years ago, how many you guys were in the room three years ago when we first did it? Okay, thank you very much for hanging out this long. It was over in the Knitting Factory. And if you remember, Anthony Morrison spoke. How many of you guys remember that? He streamed in because he wasn't able to come. It's in the members area, by the way, if you haven't listened to this. But he shared this model and what he's doing. And Anthony, he was our number one affiliate for five years inside of ClickFunnels.

And it actually was interesting. The top five affiliates are all using a variation of this model perfectly. So I had Anthony come and share that. He shared the model with everybody, and I've yet to see anybody actually do what he did, including me. And I've listened to that probably three times over the last couple of years because I'm like, I know there's something, I just need to do it, I need to do it. So I'm going to walk you through what Anthony's model is. It's really powerful.

So Anthony has a site called Partner With Anthony, PWA. And Anthony basically has a site and he charges $7 a month to join the site. And you sign up for it. And it's a training program that's going to teach you how to be successful as an affiliate marketer. And you go into the site, and there's a whole training program like, day number one, you're going to do these things. Day number two, do these things. And he walks you through it. And it's got like a, I don't know, 40, 50, 60 day free training. Not free training course, $7 a month for this training course. But that's the only thing he sells, is the $7 a month. That's the only product that Anthony actually has. Everything else is just, he's referring different things.

And so this is how he became our number one affiliate is, on day three or something, he's like, "Hey, you need to funnel. Here's a share funnel link that you need to have. Go sign up for ClickFunnels and go get your thing." And pushes it through his affiliate link. And from that he gets tons of people. And in these days of training, day four or five, six, whatever, he has other things he recommends. He recommends an email autoresponder system. So as an affiliate, he promotes different things, other companies, that's how he's making his money.

And then what's cool is that affiliate programs like ours, like ClickFunnels, we have a two-tier affiliate program. So what Anthony does is if you sign with Partner With Anthony, you can basically take his system, you can promote it as an affiliate and then you get the $7 a month as an affiliate. And then when someone signs up for ClickFunnels, you get the commissions. Anthony get second-tier commissions. Does that make sense? The way he's programmed the software. And so this, for him, became very, very viral.

And I remember Anthony told us on the thing, he's like, "I've got a hundred different products but I only promote one on paid ads." Only thing I'm doing on paid ads is this. People buy this, and then this training is free training. People love me, they're going through it, they love it. And from there, I'm recommending ClickFunnels. I'm recommending they buy this product. And all the revenue comes from him promoting other products. Sometimes he recommends his own product in here. But he never physically buys ads to promote any of his other products. He doesn't drive emails for any of his other products. Only thing he promotes is Partner With Anthony, and then the training does all the selling of everything else he's doing.

So what's interesting is like, when someone's paying for a membership site through learning, their guard's down. They're not like, "Oh, this is a sales pitch. I'm on a webinar, he's going to pitch me something. I'm on a five-day challenge. Someday he's going to pitch me something." It's like, no, this is a free training course. I'm not selling anything. But here's the tool you need for this. Here's the tool you need for this. Oh, if you want my templates for this. And the training just recommends resources. And like I said, Anthony's brilliant. He's probably one of the richest dudes I know in this market because he does really smart things like this. He doesn't do this customer support or anything, he just drives traffic to one thing and it does all the work. So he shared that.

And again, if you go back, if you guys log into the Inner Circle members area, that presentation is in there. If you listen to the Inner Circle Members Only Podcast, it's also in there. That's why I listen to it all the time, because I go back to the old Inner Circle podcast and I listen to that and a couple other ones that are really, really good. Are you guys getting this? All right. Okay. Any questions about it at all? You have a question? Do we have a microphone that I can throw at her? Toss it to me, I'll hand it over. Boom. I don't want to hit your camera. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
So affiliates is one thing I feel like I've never done. I understand the concept, but I always think, like I'm building out a startup in this program and I want to make sure the product is solid before I launch it to affiliates. I noticed, Secrets of Success, you launched affiliates right out of the gate. And so challenge my thinking. But when's the time when you start to create an affiliate program and you feel like it's the right time?

Russell Brunson:
So me personally, I think it's the first step.

Speaker 2:
I've heard you say that. That's why I'm asking this question.

Russell Brunson:
Because paid ads are the worst because paid ads... Anyway. Because I always think about this, the best traffic in the world is your own hot market, your own list who loves you. Second best are people who may not know you, but you have a partnership with somebody who does know you, and their audience does, and they can recommend. It's a warm referral like, "Hey, Mia created this really cool thing. You should go check it out." That's the second best. And then we go to the next phase, which is like now we're going out to the masses who don't know who we are. And that's colder traffic, that's paid ads.

And so a lot of you guys are going straight to paid ads. Paid ads are harder because you got to get the copies. It's harder to get copy to convert on ads, and all those kinds of things. Versus, I can throw up a page tomorrow that's like, "Hey, this is Russell. You guys want to buy this thing?" And like, "Click down below." And if I sent it to all of you guys, most of you guys will buy it just because we have an audience. But if I ran the same thing too on Facebook Ads, John would stop writing ads in 30 seconds. No one will buy this thing, no one's converting. You know what I mean? But everyone's trying to launch with the hardest thing possible.

Where I'm like, there's a huge pile of cash right here. And what you guys are all doing is you're like, there's a pile of cash, but I'm going to step over here, I'm going to step over here, I'm going to come over here and we're going to get this thing to work first and then we'll grab that. And you're trying to get it to scale everything. I'm like, wouldn't it have been easier just to grab this pile of cash and put it in the bank? And then there's a little over here. You get partners of cash and you grab all that. And you spend a year doing that. Then you take this money now and you come over and now you start running ads over here with some profit. That, in my mind, is easier.

We did two years of Clickfunnels of just grabbing all this before we had anyone, before John. It's funny, we were sitting in a meeting like, "We should probably run ads someday. Who wants to learn?" John's like, "I'll learn." And that was two years in the business before we ever ran an ad. But we'd already collected $10 million, $15 million, $20 million in profit before we started giving it away, which we need that profit. Growing a company when you're focused a hundred percent on paid ads is hard because the profits are all getting sucked out by Zuckerberg or whoever. Versus, this is like you're keeping so much more revenue upfront. Anyway, that's my belief.

Speaker 2:
You test the product. For you, now you have an audience that knows, likes and trusts you. And it's all the same vertical, Clickfunnels, Zoom, Loomly or whatever. All those are kind of the same market, and so it's like they're going to trust you in those same verticals. And so if you have a product that maybe you haven't tested before? That's my limited belief.

Russell Brunson:
Is it like info product or software product?

Speaker 2:
It's info, but I'm putting e-commerce tied to it.

Russell Brunson:
Does it work?

Speaker 2:
I mean, it's principles I've learned over the last 20 years bottled up. So yeah.

Russell Brunson:
Yeah.

Speaker 2:
I've tested it in micro doses, so now I'm launching it. But still, I feel like there's things to test. Because affiliates, you have to build these relationships and you have to answer all these objections and things. And so do you just bottle all that up before you launch it?

Russell Brunson:
My experience is, most affiliates, oh sorry, I didn't tell end of the story. This might answer the part of the question. But I told you, I did the webinar to our own list and I had the stats. Then I had this person's list, I had the stats. So when I do an affiliate, they don't know who I am most of the time. I'm like, "Hey, we've run this webinar 12 times. Here's everyone's stats." And you see boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And they're like, "Oh cool, I'm in." Most affiliates are doing it because they're trying to figure out how to make. They want obviously a good product and stuff like that. But they want a webinar that converts or they want an offer that converts. That's more important, typically.

Speaker 2:
So are they doing their own webinars? I'm like, this is the new space that I want to get into and so I'm going to jump through all my false beliefs.

Russell Brunson:
You're doing the webinar, they're just setting up the audience.

Speaker 2:
So okay taking your webinar. They're just sending them to your webinar?

Russell Brunson:
Yeah, I do one specifically for them.

Speaker 2:
Okay.

Russell Brunson:
Let's say I was doing one, we set up a webinar. It's like, the pitch, me and your face on it, and you're like, "Hey, my friend Russell got this really cool thing. We're going to do a webinar. We're going to talk about it." And they all jump on. Then you introduce like, "Hey, all right, so Russell showed me this really cool thing they're doing. It's awesome. And I asked him if he could come today and show you guys behind the scenes how it works. Check this out. And then you kick it to me, and then I go and do my full perfect webinar and I sell it.

Speaker 2:
Okay. And they get all the-

Russell Brunson:
Then they get the commissions, yeah. Yep.

Speaker 2:
Okay. I'm willing to switch my thought.

Russell Brunson:
But that's the way we've done it. And again, I don't know, starting directly with paid ads. We even did it with Secrets of Success. We launched Secrets of Success, we promoted to our list. We first promoted it, we collected a million dollars for two days. And the second million dollars, we took that money to run the ads. We've been running ads, and we spent way too much money. We still couldn't get ads to work. And I'm like, "Man, if I were to start with ads, I'm like, this business is dead. I would've given up." We've already collected $2 million from not ads, and now we got some breathing room to figure out how to get paid ads to work. Versus, if I'd started there, we'd still be sitting around with no members. Ads are way harder than just your own list and affiliates. Because affiliates are implied endorsement, right? They're coming from somebody else. Always converts higher. You can be worse, and make more money, which is great. That help?

Speaker 2:
Yeah.

Russell Brunson:
Cool.

Speaker 2:
Thanks.

Russell Brunson:
All right, back here. Now we're getting some questions coming in.

Speaker 3:
What do you do when your audience are not marketers? Our audience is mostly Catholic moms. And so there's lots of influencers or people who have lots of wonderful content about faith and family. But we have limited success with them when they're trying to sell something to their audience who isn't used to being sold to. And they also are really inexperienced with marketing and any of this in our world. We shared a little bit with them of the stuff that we learned at FHL about the sort of sequence of stories and things. We've had limited success with it. But I would love affiliate marketing to work because I just love relationships over Zuckerberg. But we just cannot get it to scale.

Russell Brunson:
You say it doesn't work when your customers are the affiliates or when your partners that have audiences are trying it?

Speaker 3:
When our partners, when our other influencers.

Russell Brunson:
Okay, what are those influencers selling? Are they selling anything?

Speaker 3:
Nope.

Russell Brunson:
They're just influencers who just influence for fun?

Speaker 3:
Yep.

Russell Brunson:
That's so crazy, huh? How do they make their money?

Speaker 3:
They don't. They just love hanging out on social media and building community and showing cute pictures of their kids, and talking about what they're passionate about, faith.

Russell Brunson:
Cool. So is the problem that they can't promote correctly or their people don't buy?

Speaker 3:
Both.

Russell Brunson:
Which one's the bigger problem?

Speaker 3:
I mean, their people buy because their people are also our customers, and don't have any problem buying.

Russell Brunson:
The hard thing is getting them to promote?

Speaker 3:
Yeah.

Russell Brunson:
Okay. And then in the past, how have you compensated them?

Speaker 3:
Percentage of sales pre-product.

Russell Brunson:
Okay, my experience, and Alison Prince will be able to speak to this way better than me. But a lot of times, that type of influencer, especially if they don't know affiliate marketing, the percentages are confusing and they don't understand it. So 30% doesn't make sense in their head. And so what we've done a lot of times in the past is we shifted around, we were paid a CPL. So Zuckerberg, you're going to spend what? How much per lead would you spend on Facebook for opting for a webinar, let's say?

Speaker 3:
Well, for our product, average order value's about $50. And so we try to keep it around 20, 25.

Russell Brunson:
Are you just selling through a webinar? How do you sell it? Straight VSL or what?

Speaker 3:
Nope, just to Shopify.

Russell Brunson:
Okay. Shopify. Do you have an opt-in? If the affiliate's promoting, you having an affiliate push to Shopify, are you having them promote anything?

Speaker 3:
Shopify. Yeah.

Russell Brunson:
Okay. I would do that. I'd try to figure out what's a way that you can make it really, really easier for the affiliate. So for example, what I might do is say you do an event, a co-branded event. It could be just a fun, whatever. Have them promote that and say, I'm going to pay you $1 for every single lead that registers for our thing. Because then now it's not like 30% of like, doesn't make any sense to me, no one's going to buy, whatever. It's just like, "I'll pay you a dollar per lead." Which is, I guess if you were to pay Zuckerberg for the same, you're paying $3 to $5 for lead. So now you're a third of the cost or whatever, and they're freaking out because, "Wait, I get somebody to put their email address so you can give me a dollar every single time?" And now it's something they can tangibly do. If I send 1,000 people or 10,000 people, the numbers now make sense in their head real easily. And then it's very simple. And then you do that, you jump on.

And you can even just like, you guys doing a Facebook Live, hang out, them introduce you, you talk about the thing, then you push to the Shopify store and you keep 100% of profits. That way they don't have any risk or anything, and they're getting paid up front. Now in their head it makes more sense. So whenever I've done affiliates who aren't traditional affiliates, who don't understand it, I usually come back, try to pay them CPL. If I pay you cost per lead or sometimes it's cost per click. Every click you send, I'll pay you 50 cents. They're like, "What? This is amazing." And I'm like, "Huh, I pay Zuckerberg $3 per click. This is insane." It's a whole different world.

In fact, some of you guys may know Eric Byers in the Atlas program. But he's a traffic broker. That's all he does. And so he goes to these big places and he finds people with huge lists, huge databases of stuff, and they don't understand our world at all. And so he'll pay 5 cents a click, and then he sells them to us for 25 cents a click, and he's making 5X his money. And then I'm like, "I'd normally pay a dollar for this click." And it's just arbitrage the whole way through. And so you're going to the level where you can get people for insanely cheap because they don't understand the value of their traffic. And so just looking at how do I structure it for that affiliate where it's just a no-brainer for them?

That's the funny thing about affiliate marketing. Because what I found is there's different tiers of affiliates. Some affiliates, all they care about is just money. They're just money-obsessed. They don't care what the product is, and those ones are the ones that are easiest to deal with because they just want money. As long as your offer converts, they'll promote it. The next one are people more like me who are obsessed, like, I want an amazing customer experience. As long as the customer experience is the best in the world, that's what they care about. They don't care how much money they make or whatever, they just want to make sure it's going to serve their customers. That's number two. And then the third are just people that don't know what they're doing. And so it's like you just work with them and figure out what is it you're looking for? You craft it and create it, and then boom, you can do some really cool things.

Speaker 3:
Yeah. Awesome. Thank you.

Russell Brunson:
Yeah. No worries.

Speaker 4:
You're talking about affiliates and then the delay, and click fraud and things like that. Do you have any bridging the gap between that and affiliates for services? So you're obviously familiar with what we do. I've never entertained affiliates or taken a shot at it because of that risk, because our service is delayed or is higher ticket, and things like that. Do you have any experience or recommendations for a potential how I could roll out an affiliate on an agency side?

Russell Brunson:
Yeah. So one of the easy things I've seen people do in your situation is, there's different ways affiliates get paid, right? I'm paying out, on ours, 100% front-end commission. Some people pay out recurring, where it's like you're getting 40% of the recurring thing. The other one is you pay an upfront CPA. So for example, Shopify right now will pay an affiliate like $200, $250 when you get someone to sign for a free trial. Now you get none of the money afterwards, but just the money upfront for setting it up. So what you could do is create something where it's like a $300 onboarding something, and you pay affiliates a hundred percent of that. And then the risk is that. But then afterwards you're onboarding the client, then you own the person moving forward for the rest of it. Does that make sense?

Speaker 4:
Yeah.

Russell Brunson:
Again, Anthony Morrison that I was talking about, his brother's Adrian Morrison, he's Shopify's number one affiliate right now. So they actually pay him I think $350 for every free trial he signs up, but he gets nothing afterwards. Just that. So he's able to spend $200, $300 to get a lead. And he's Shopify's number one affiliate right now. So same thing is, you can create something on the front end that doesn't cost you a lot of money that you could pay so they get the big upfront even though they know, hey, they're going to sign a $10,000 a month contract for the next year. The affiliate wouldn't get any of that because that's when it gets harder because you have your hard costs and all the other things. I would try to create something on the front end that brings somebody in, that then 100%, or 50%, whatever that is you could pay out an affiliate on that. And that's how I would shift it. Does that make sense?

Speaker 4:
Yep.

Russell Brunson:
Sorry. The light's shining, I can barely see it, and then. Okay. Cool. That's how I'd structure something like that. Even if it's something like front end, we do a keyword research and the consulting and figure out something like that, upfront work, paying out a lot more on that, and nothing on the continuity side.

Speaker 4:
Cool. Thanks.

Russell Brunson:
Yep.

Speaker 5:
I have another question. So we started an affiliate program. And we do pay them per click, per lead, and then if there's a conversion. But the problem we have is retention. They would send out a promotion and then stop. And so how do we get them to continually promote a product?

Russell Brunson:
Affiliates, by default, especially good affiliates are lazy. So that's what we've noticed. If someone agrees to promote something, that's step one, but it doesn't mean they're actually going to do anything. So for us it's like, we write the ads for them, we write the copy, we do the stuff. And then we have to give them reasons to promote. That's why I was showing you guys yesterday when I was showing you, for Secrets of Success, all the little, mini dramatic demonstrations we're doing every single month. It's because the affiliates just promote it once. They don't want to promote the same thing again. So I have to give them a reason to promote. So I'm like, "Hey, this month we're doing this cool Earl Nightingale campaign. Do you want to promote that?" And they're like, "Oh, that's unique. That's different. Yes." Even though it's selling the same product, but it's different campaigns and different things like that.

And then, honestly, you have to have an affiliate manager who's in contact. We've got multiple people who run our affiliate program on our team. They're talking to affiliates all the time trying to be like, "What's working? What are you doing right now? What are you looking for? And do you have a promotional schedule? Can you send an email out? Could we do a social media blast? Could we put a link in the PS of your emails?" But they're in constant communication with our top affiliates, trying to figure out how we can weave into what they're already doing.

And I'm a really good affiliate. We're all nightmares. We're the hardest people to work with just because we can make a lot of money, and we know that. So it's coming back and understanding, we got to help them and figure out different ways to integrate. That's why I think having an affiliate manager who's full time working with affiliates is an essential role if you really want to do this well. Because they got to be constantly communicating with them, showing them the new offer.

So this is where our affiliate manager will focus most of the effort, on those who are in here. And then my job as the person is I got to keep coming out with new offers. So I'm going to come out with a new Secrets of Success offer, and then all the affiliate managers will hit everyone, "Hey, there's a new offer, Secrets of Success. Everyone go run it." And then I'll do the next one that'll come out, and then the next. So we're putting out new offers to give them new things to promote and to go out there.

If you're an actual affiliate, like in an affiliate network, you sign up for an affiliate network, which basically is a whole bunch of tons of different offers. What typically happens, you'll be connected with an affiliate manager and they're hitting you up a couple of times a day like, "Hey, there's new offer from this company, want to try it? Here's an offer from here." And they're hitting you up trying to figure out what offers you want to promote. But it's a constant communication with your top affiliates.

Speaker 5:
So you're saying, have different type of offer or just a spin on the same offer?

Russell Brunson:
Both. Yes and yes. It's like, I'll have the Dotcom Secrets book funnel and the Traffic Secrets book funnel and this. But I also have dramatic demonstration about this part of the thing. So we're giving different offers, different webinar. We're just putting out different front end things to get them engaged, to get them excited about whatever we're promoting.

Speaker 5:
Thank you.

Russell Brunson:
Yeah. Yep.

Speaker 6:
So if you were to start over as an affiliate, what would you do to do Secrets of Success as an affiliate of your own company?

Russell Brunson:
How would I promote as an affiliate?

Speaker 6:
Yeah.

Russell Brunson:
We could hold a three-day event on that. That'd be really fun.

Speaker 6:
Yeah, I know.

Russell Brunson:
I mean, the reality is I would try to build a list, a segmented list based on the topic. So I would take my existing audience. I'd be like, "Hey, I'm doing this cool thing over here. If you're interested, opt in." And I would segment everybody to here's people interested in this topic. And then I would create bonuses to get people. So as an affiliate, I mean, you guys have seen me promote things.

When I promote something as an affiliate, my, usually, thing is like, "Hey, this is the offer that they're going to give you. But I'm going to throw in these three bonuses from me." I create a better offer. And that's how I usually win most affiliate competitions, is by just figuring out how can I make this offer even more sexy? What bonuses can I create? What training? What kind of things can I put together? And I have a sub list, and I would just keep sending them stuff based on that.

Speaker 7:
So I remember that in 2015 you did a contest with a Ferrari, that Jeff Walker won.

Russell Brunson:
Yeah.

Speaker 7:
What do you think about those contests? Are you thinking doing, pros and cons?

Russell Brunson:
Yeah. I'm thinking how to show you. I wish we could show you guys. We should let you on the next affiliate launch, let you guys behind scenes to see how we do it. So there's two ways to look at me running an affiliate program. Number one is I like doing launches because launches, first off, you get a lot of cash coming in, a lot of traffic and it's fun to get people behind something.

So for example, in May, Justin, Ben and I are working on the Think and Grow Rich Challenge. So this is a challenge that's coming up. So we have a whole bunch of affiliates. And we want to create a fun competition amongst affiliates because that gets everyone promoting harder. And so we set a date, this is what's happening. And so we have a whole launch calendar, everyone, and we start contacting affiliates. They come in and then there's a beginning of the launch, there's an end of a launch. We always give away prizes and things like that. Usually there's the top 10 get prizes, the top three get better prizes. We make a whole bunch of prizes. That helps a lot doing a launch like that. It's also a lot of work though, and you end up spending a lot of money on prizes and things like that. But it works really well.

So there's that side of it. And then there's also a rolling launch, where I have a really good offer. And for example, when we launched ClickFunnels, I didn't just do one webinar for everyone and it was done. I did a webinar to your list, and then to your list. And so I was doing a rolling launch, going for a year. I was just rolling week after week, week after week, hitting more and more people. So the question a lot of times is like, which one's better? And for me it's like they're both amazing. I like doing the big launch because of the big payday. But then the launch is over, and now it's like, cool, now we're moving to rolling launch and let's get a person and another person. And we're just rolling through as many people to keep traffic and sales coming in.

Speaker 7:
Cool.

Russell Brunson:
Does that make sense? Yeah. Affiliate prizes are great. One really cool thing about affiliate prizes, typically if you look at when we're doing an affiliate launch, the top 10, we almost always include some type of mastermind. And there's a reason. Here's the strategic evil reason behind it. Because what happens is like, we do the launch, they win the mastermind trip. And then we time the mastermind trip a little bit before the next launch is going to happen. So it happens. They all come out, we hang out with them, we do a mastermind, we serve them food, we have a good time, everything's amazing. And then at the affiliate mastermind launch, like, "Hey, just so you guys know, the next launch is happening next month. Here's what it is." Now our top 10 affiliates all are there in one spot. We recommit them to the next launch and they'd roll out the next launch.

And so that's a big piece of the strategy. So for like Secrets of Success. We did the affiliate launch. We did, yeah, the affiliate launch, and then the prize was we took everyone to Chicago to the Nightingale-Conant offices, and we did a full one-day event there. And at the event, we said to everyone, "Hey, the next launch is Think and Grow Challenge. It's coming up in two months from now." We committed them, got them all scheduled out. And so hopefully those people all promote again. And then from them, the next prize is we're just going to Wise, Virginia, to Napoleon Hill's house for the next prize. They want to win that. It helps push people from thing to thing to thing.

Very cool. Back here. It's so interesting to me, real quick, before you jump in. 15 years ago, when you'd go to a marketing event, all we talked about was JVs. It's funny because here, everyone talks about ads. And it's like, for a lot of you guys, this is so foreign. And it's funny to me because it's like, man, back in the day, this is the only thing we talked about. No one talked about ads or pay-per-click. It was just fascinating kind of. Anyway, sorry.

Speaker 8:
No, you're good. So I was curious. Do you think that this works if your dream client is somebody who wouldn't have a list, isn't on the entrepreneurial side or anything? Like, everybody that we go after is a W2 who just has their Inner Circle. Is it worth trying to set up an affiliate program if we don't really have anybody that would know what a list even is, like if you pull out the entrepreneurial side?

Russell Brunson:
For sure. So a couple of things. So we look at this two ways. There's customers who love what you do, and they're usually going to bring in one or two. They're not going to be big affiliates. That's what the training side is. But again, they may only pick up one or two sales. It's not a huge deal. But if we bring a lot of our customers in there, they love our stuff and they can refer other people, the volume becomes big. The bigger side of the affiliate program is going out and actually attracting people who are affiliates. For sure, that's the bigger thing.

So the Affiliate Evolution offer is interesting because it's twofold. Number one, we're going to train beginners and give them a platform, help them, train them up. But number two, it's like we're going to use this to go out to all the big affiliates like, "Hey, you've promoted our stuff in the past. You want a hundred percent commission? Cool. Join the site right now, upgrade to 100% commission. And then we get them to promote.

So when I look at an affiliate program, I'm less looking at banking on my existing customers being the ones who are going to drive a lot of volume, because they're usually not. Instead, I'm like, who are the other people in my industry? Looking back at your Dream 100. Who are the people who already have my dream customers on a list? That's what I'm focusing my affiliate program on initially. Because again, you get one or two of those to promote something, that's worth a hundred customers who are doing one-sie, two-sie sales, you know what I mean? So if you're looking at where to focus the most effort, it's definitely on who are the influencers in your space that you could focus on catering and building out a really good affiliate program for.

Speaker 8:
Awesome. Thank you.

Russell Brunson:
Yep. No worries. Okay. Is that all it? All right. No. We got one more. Okay.

Speaker 9:
When we finish with a customer, we deliver, they're happy with our service/product. If we were to bring them on to you, where do you think would be the best place to introduce them to you to help them develop that entrepreneurial side of things? Where do you think, to, "Hey, you should be purchasing these books"? What would be the most seamless?

Russell Brunson:
So for every one of you guys, that's going to be different, based on what your front end business is. Which is why I need an affiliate manager. So what I would do is I'd have Ben Harris talk to you and be like, he'd ask "What's your business? How does it work? Where's someone at?" And then from there it's like, "Okay, based on this, for you, a book would be the best thing." Just have you set up a campaign for the book. But it might be like, the book might not be right for your audience. Maybe it's the webinars. Like, oh, let's do a webinar.

Or a lot of times, for our team, it's like if someone's got a big enough list and it's like, Hey, let's do a collab webinar. We'll actually bring Russell on live, or we'll bring on one of our webinar presenters on live. We'll create a whole webinar for you, where it's co-branded. And then you can come and be like, "Hey, I'm doing this cool webinar with ClickFunnels." And it's a co-branded thing now. And so it just kind of depends. That's why it's good to have an affiliate manager, who's kind of trying to put together these deals with people. Because again, every affiliate's going to be a little bit different. And again, some affiliates just want cash, someone want a really good experience, some are looking for stuff. It's a personal thing. Yeah.

Speaker 10:
I just want to share that this works. Six years ago we were giving $100,000 a month to Zuckerberg and Google combined. And fast-forward now, 95% of our business comes from affiliate partners. And just exactly what he was saying, there's those that are just going to send two or three deals in. They'll just use your automated funnel. But when you have a big player that has a big list, that's where you do that custom webinar, and you do it together with them. Maybe you record it and they put it in their email autoresponder for some of their new clients. And that way you're getting clients in continuously. But that custom webinar, we do that all the time with big partners, and that brings in monster business.

Russell Brunson:
Yeah, it's huge. How many of you guys read the book, Integration Marketing, by Mark Joyner? If you haven't, it's like an hour long read. It's really short. But it's fascinating. So Integration Marketing is like, because again, if I come to Dave Lindemann, I'm like, "Hey man, will you promote my thing?" He's like, "Yes, it's amazing." So we do a promotion, he promotes it, we get a bunch of sales. And then it's over and then it's done. So Integration Marketing is really interesting. It's like finding partners. And yes, you want to do the one-time sell.

But it's like, how do I integrate my business into his business so that even after the promotion's done, it's not over. So for example, if I was to come back to Dave, I'd be like, "Hey, let's do a webinar together. It's going to be amazing." So we do a webinar together. Whatever happens, it converts well. And then we record the whole thing. I say, "Okay, I'm going to build an evergreen funnel out of the webinar we did together." So I build an evergreen funnel for him. I'm like, "Hey, let's go back to your email sequence. And where can we plug this into your email sequence?" He's like, "Well, I have a 12-day email sequence." "Cool, day 13 through 15, we do three emails. Let's put those in. They're all pushing this webinar. And that way the webinar I did once, you'll get paid forever."

And then I'm like, "What else could we do?" He's like, "Well, in social media, I've got this, or I've got whatever it is." And I'm like, "How do we integrate it in? How do I put it so that on your thank you page, after somebody opts into your list, I can put a link on the thank you page that pushes now to the webinar we did together?" So go back to his offers, we plug it in there. And now all your customers, when they buy a product, you take them to the membership site. How do I put this offer to the member? And so we try to integrate into that person's sales process everywhere we can do.

And so for me, when we launched ClickFunnels, Mark Joyner was my first mentor. He had just written Integration Marketing. So I was like, how do we start doing this? And so for the last decade, I've been doing this process with our affiliates. Do the promotion. Then we'll come back and try to weave things into their sequences, their autoresponders, things like that. And we'd get so much traffic. Again, I told you, it's like more than 50% of our traffic comes from affiliates. And these are not people doing active affiliate promotions most of the time. Usually it's like, we set up all these deals five years ago, and every time they get an opt-in their funnel, email 13, they're hitting us ClickFunnels. And most times they forget that it's even in the sequence. And we just keep getting traffic as their companies grow. So that's the other powerful thing about affiliate marketing. We start looking at it through that lens. It's just like, every single person, if I can integrate into that person's business, as their business grows, my business grows, right? Anyway, so that's really the power.

Again, our top five affiliates, none of these guys actually promote Clickfunnels. But all of them have some kind of training system, and we're plugged into every one of their training systems where day 3 or day 10, they're telling the people they need a funnel and then they give them a Clickfunnels share funnel, and we're the ones plugged in there. And so it's like, these people, as their businesses grow, our businesses grows. And it's just the most beautiful thing in the world to figure how you can integrate into other people's businesses. Does that help?

Speaker 3:
Yes.

Russell Brunson:
Because then we do that. We spend a year doing that, spend three years doing that, and then you can cut off Zuckerberg. I'm done. Cut off paid ads, just retire. And everyone else's businesses are growing. Your business grows on the backend because of it, which is awesome. Do you have a question?

Speaker 3:
Yes. I'd love your opinion on the places that aggregate a whole bunch of affiliates, like Clickbank.com.

Russell Brunson:
Yes. Great question. So I'm a big, again, this is going to be different for everyone's market. But affiliate networks are nice because they aggregate affiliates. So Clickbank.com, for example, if you go there, there's a whole marketplace with thousands of products and affiliates come and they can promote things. So what I typically do, and what we do all the time, but if I'm going to new business, I'll go to ClickBank and I'll go find the top 20, 30 offers and I sign up for all their affiliate programs. And when you do that, you get on all their lists. And what's typically happening is most of these affiliate programs are doing affiliate launches. And so they'll send out links like, "Hey, we did our affiliate launch. Here's the top 10 affiliates." And boom, they show you, here's the top 10 affiliates by name."

And guess what you do? You look up their name on Facebook, you become friends with them, you send them a present in the mail. All of a sudden, the top 10 affiliates, you can ask. A lot of times people will come in. In fact, we had a guy at Secrets of Success. He'd never promoted anything ever.

He promoted.

He was like the top two or three affiliate. And he's like, "Man, I did that one affiliate promotion." He's like, "It's so crazy. I felt like 50 people reached out to me to promote their offer." I'm like, "Yeah, it's because you're on the top 10 list." And so if there's affiliates happening in your business, join everyone's affiliate program, sign up for them and just start watching what they're doing because typically, some version of that's happening when they're talking about their top 10 affiliates. And then you start getting to know who the affiliates are, you get to know their affiliate managers. It's all, again, just a relationship business.

And so I try to get to know the affiliate managers in all the different programs because they have access to all of their dream affiliates. And a lot of times we've literally had it before where we'll ask the affiliate manager like, "Man, you guys are awesome." We'll have a good conversation. I'm like, "Who are you guys' top affiliates?" And they'll literally like, "Here's all our top affiliates." They just give this info. I'm like, "You just gave me your top affiliates. This is insane." So there's a lot of things like that. In the how to make money on the internet world, obviously there's ClickBank, there's other ones. There's a whole bunch of aggregates that have those kinds of things. I'm not sure about other industries if that's as applicable. But if you can find it, it's a big part of it. Great question. Any other affiliate questions? Back here.

Speaker 11:
Well, I agree. The question I have is, you're talking about Integration Marketing. By that psychology, is there any special thinking that you do within an affiliate contest launch? For example, I'm thinking of Bridger and Mason's gamification for their events and stuff like that to sell tickets. Are you doing anything like that with how you promote your affiliate launches, with the rewards inside of what comes in the contest? Does that make sense?

Russell Brunson:
Yeah. If you look on the back end, there's some people that are better than others. Again, I'm signing to everyone's affiliate launch, I'm always watching it. The ones that can do the gamification, it's a big deal, where they're always doing prizes. It's like, "There's a weekend prize, there's a Thursday. Whoever gets the most sales today, whoever gets the most opt-ins today." Dean does a great job of this on all the Dean and Tony launches, where it's like, "All right, this weekend we're doing a leads contest. Whoever gets the most leads, we're sending out an iPad. Whoever gets the most leads, you're going to get this." And so everyone's fighting for leads. And the next day it's like, there's another thing and they're competing. And then every day it's like talking trash between number two and number three and number one. And it's this whole trash talking game, and it's competitive and it's fun. And the best launches have a lot of those kinds of things, a lot of gamification amongst the affiliates in there.

And again, that's why you should join everyone's affiliate launches. How many of you guys are affiliates of Dean and Tony's? How many of you guys are affiliates of Stu McLaren? Both these programs are launching in the next 30 days? Go and join it. Get in their Facebook group and just watch, and just look at the games that are happening behind the scenes because they're both really, really good at what they're doing. And if you're like, I don't know how to get to Stu's affiliate program. I don't know, go type in Stu McLaren product launch or whatever name of his course launch.

And anytime you see the launch happening, people are promoting stuff. Search for the product name and JV affiliate. Go to Facebook. Usually there's a Facebook group for almost every affiliate launch where all the affiliates are in there together. They're talking and hanging out. And just start looking for those things and start plugging yourself in because that's where you'll see this happening. You'll see the games and you can model for what you're doing. Plus again, you can start stealing their affiliates and building relationships with the top people and that kind of stuff. I mean, meeting their top affiliates. Yeah. Good questions.

Okay. Any more before? Got two more things then. All right, I'll think about that. I'll think about putting together something. It's actually funny, Stu McLaren and I, man, almost probably close to 20 years ago now. When we first met Stu was the affiliate manager for Dan Kennedy's business, Armand Morin's and Alex Mendozian. He was affiliate manager for all these guys. And I had my own affiliate program back then. I think I had 38,000 affiliates for my program way back, 20 years ago. And so we came together and we did an event called Affiliate Inferno, which taught people how to run and launch their own affiliate program. And it was like, we did a three or four-day event. It was really, really cool. But I haven't really talked about that kind of stuff for a long time. So I'll look at putting together something for you guys that could be a more complete thing to really help.

Again, my whole goal in life is, all the things I can do right now to decrease my dependence on Mark Zuckerberg, the better. So that's my number one goal right now with everything. And so this is such a big focus for what we're doing. All these other things we're doing, just to focus more on affiliates, advertising networks, everything that's not related to those guys. And so I think for all of you guys, just to protect yourselves for future, understanding affiliate marketing and being able to build that part of your business is such, I don't know. I think it's detrimental. If you read the Traffic Secrets book, if you read the intro, it's like, "There's a storm coming." And I was talking about this, like, "Right now, when I'm writing this, Facebook's the greatest thing in the world. We all love it. But the storm's coming, I promise you." Right now, I feel like we're in that and it's getting harder and harder. And it's not going to get easier. And so now is the time to really start focusing on these other alternative methods that are powerful.