How lit are your affiliate marketing skills? Most affiliates get into the industry to fund a dream: but how do you go from campaign grinding to what you really want to do?
Drawing on his own experience and that of many other super affiliates who have moved on to build mega-businesses, top the App Store with their passion project games, and more, Hugh Hancock gives practical, down-to-earth, battle-tested advice on how you can leverage your unfair advantages from affiliate marketing – determination, skills, and yes, cash flow – to achieve your ultimate dream projects even in the face of incredible competition.
Speech by Hugh Hancock | Affiliate Expert & Founder, Machinima
Hugh Hancock Speech Transcript
Hello, everyone.
So, this talk is a talk that I would only ever give to the audience right in front of me, right now.
And, the reason is we have all had a shared experience.
At some point, we all clicked on a link. We went to a website. The website was mostly primary colours.
There was maybe some black on white text, there was some yellow highlighting, there were some very big numbers.
There were some PayPal screenshots that could not possibly have been Photoshopped.
Too Good To Be True
And in the top, there was a headline and the headline read something like this, “make $ XX,XXX a day working at home by yourself in your stained boxer shorts.”
You see, this is where most people, most people who are working 9-5 jobs, who have never started a company, who have never taken a risk would say, there is no way that this is true.
You are so gullible if you believe this. This is too good to be true.
And, every single one of us went, “nope that seems perfectly legit to me.”
The thing is we were all right.
This talk is not just about conquering industries, any industry.
Let’s be honest. If an experienced affiliate decides that they want to conquer the Tibetan the healing crystals industry, they can probably do that perfectly comfortably without my help.
In fact, I’m pretty sure I have seen that Shopify shop already.
This talk is about the impossible industries. It’s about becoming the President of the United States, it’s about becoming an astronaut, it’s about founding a Silicon Valley startup that will compete with Facebook.
It’s about becoming a movie star, a movie maker, a creator. Any of these things that people say you just can’t do.
Making Dreams Come True
I’m here to say 2 things.
Firstly, that you absolutely can do them, I’m living proof.
And, secondly, that as affiliates, each and every one of us has an unbeatable skill set for going into these impossibly competitive industries and making our dreams come true.
One thing I should mention, by the way, I know some of you may now be going, “Oh this sounds a bit like motivational speaking.”
Don’t worry, I have no intention of telling you awake your inner giant, spank your inner Muppet, prune your intestinal petunia.
There will be no big hand claps or fist pumping of any kind. This is all practical, solid experience.
And talking of experience, who the hell am I and why would I know about this stuff?
Who Is Hugh Hancock?
Maria already introduced me briefly. I was a filmmaker long before I became an affiliate, I was an animated filmmaker, which is like regular film-making, except it is slower, harder and more expensive.
And, I made films which competed in viewership numbers and review scores, critical acclaim with films that had over 10,000 times their budget. That’s not an exaggeration.
I worked with movie stars like Joanna Lumley, Jack Davenport, Brian Blessed. I accidentally created an art form, which is fun as part of all this.
And I founded the site Machinima, which attracted multiple billion views. It was the biggest channel on YouTube for a good long while. Recently sold to Time Warner for a number I cannot disclose but which had quite a lot of zeros on the end.
Subsequent to that, I decided that live-action film-making was what I wanted to do.
And in a year, I went from what is this thing you call a camera to have multiple award nominations for my films.
Then, a large box arrived at my front door with the words HTC vibe, virtual reality headset on it. I ignored the box because I was very busy with campaigns and with filmmaking.
And, it sat in my hole until one day, my girlfriend got pissed off and said, “Look we have this sobbing great thing blocking the path for the bathroom, would you please try the thing out or chuck it out.”
So, I did. I put the thing on, I tried it out. I came out 2 hours later. And, I said right, I’m canceling all my film projects, I’m stopping all my campaigns.
Virtual Reality
What I am doing from now is virtual reality. It was an angel from heaven divine light moment.
It was astonishing.
And, since then, with no background as a programmer, no background as a game developer, I am now the creator of the largest single-player virtual reality experience out there, which is quite nice.
I’ve also consulted for this talk with a number of other superaffiliates, who I know who do amazing things.
I’ve talked to people who make luxury, who have luxury hotels. And, I’ve talked to one person who has gotten his games, the number one on the App Store for iOS in multiple countries.
I’ve talked to people who have founded near unicorn startups. A whole load of things.
And a lot of things have become clear, in terms of how the affiliate skill set can let you get to the top of these industries.
So what I’m going to do is I’m gonna give you a blueprint, like I said no motivational speaking or hard practical stuff.
Blueprint On How To Get To The Top
I’m gonna give you a blueprint on how you can use your affiliate skills to get to the top. And the way I’m going to do that is through the structure of a conventional, affiliate campaign.
First, let me just check in the audience.
If you were 10 times smarter than anyone else if there was no way that you could possibly fail, can I just check, who here would want to be a professional creative of some kind?
Musician, filmmaker, rockstar anything like that. Raise your hands.
Writer? Yep, writer.
Poet? Yep, yep. Fair few people there.
Okay, who would want to change the world? Who would want to be a politician, an activist, run charities, do aid in Africa.
Anything like that? Anybody here?
Okay, I see a couple of hands in the back. Yeah, but not too many people, okay.
Who would want to be a professional athlete of some kind? A professional sportsman, MMA fighter? Yeah, I see a couple of hands there. Okay cool.
Yeah, so it’s fairly, fairly, broad, rounded scope. All of these things are possible.
Starting Point: Spying
So we’re affiliates, we’re entering a new vertical. What is the first thing we do? This is not a metaphorical question.
What is the first thing we do? You’re entering a new vertical, you haven’t run it before. What’s the first thing you do?
Spy is exactly the right answer. You spy the living shit out of it.
If you are an affiliate entering a new vertical, you’re going to know your competitor’s leg size, you’re gonna know the timing of their bowel movements, you are going to know everything there is to know about them.
Spying: What’s The Job?
And that is something that most people in these industries or any industries don’t do. I mean suits will call it competitive research but I like spying.
So the first thing you need to spy if you’re looking at one of these super competitive industries, and this might seem weird, is you want to know what the job is.
Now, this might seem really dumb, but going into being a professional musician, you know what you’re doing.
You’re standing up on stage, you’re rocking out, you’re doing stage slides, which I’m not going to do because this will kill my knees.
But let me give you an example if you want to be a professional TV showrunner, does anyone here not know what a showrunner is?
Raise your hand if so. Okay. I’m going to assume you do.
Professional TV Show Runner
It’s the guy who runs the show like Vince Gilligan on Breaking Bad, for example. Sounds like an amazing job.
You get to create these fantastic stories, you get these enormous budgets to play with, and you get to work with these fantastic actors. You get to send your work out to millions and millions of people.
I wanted to be a showrunner for quite a long while until I researched it.
You see the thing with being a showrunner is that your job starts when you go into the room of a network executive. And he’s wearing a super expensive suit and you are probably in a Hawaiian shirt and don’t dodgy shorts.
And you say to him, “I would like you to give me a $100,000,000 please. I would like you to give me that so I can have my friends, who pretend for a living, to pretend to run away from dragons repeatedly on camera and then we’re going to sell this and we’re going to make you all your money back.”
And the network executive’s first question is, “Well yeah okay, but I mean can I see these dragons? Can I get some idea of what that’s going to look like?”
And you say, “No, you can see some ping pong balls. Maybe I’ll show you them running from a stick at some point.”
It is a Sh*t Job
The network executive, his job is to give you the money.
This is an anecdote I borrowed from a guy called John Rogers, who is a showrunner.
And this results in the network executives breathing down your neck constantly. They’re constantly giving you notes, they’re constantly hassling you.
They constantly giving you feedback and they are not the only ones.
The actors are constantly worrying that their characters are not heroic enough, too heroic, would do this thing, and wouldn’t do this thing, whatever.
They are your employees, no they’re not. For the first two seasons, they’re your employees. And after that, they are far more famous than you and you work for them.
You’re gonna have the crew hassling you and so on and so on and so on.
Your job as a showrunner, it turns out it’s primarily to be the guy who 500 people are shouting at, at any given time. You have to get every single one of them to work together.
That’s actually a shit job or at least I think is a shit job, which is why I decided not to do it.
If you find this, you can then start working around it to figure out ways to make the fun parts of the job fun, and the shit parts of the job not there.
That’s what I did with Machinima for example, the art forum, like I say I created. This is how I ended up making feature films with a thousand times less budget than anyone else.
What Are The Physical Demands Of The Job
Another thing you need to check out, and this is something I have been bitten by recently, is you need to know what the physical demands of the job you desperately want to do are.
If you want to be a professional Hollywood director of photography, for example. You might want to know that on average, professional Hollywood cameramen live about 12 months after they retire because the job is so demanding that it literally kills them.
Not great.
Spying: Find The Softest Market
So, assuming you have figured out that you do actually want to do the job. The next thing to do is to spy to find the softest market.
Now this was fun. I as I said, asked a number of superaffiliates for input on this talk.
And one person I asked was Lorenzo Green, who many of you will know as Mr. Green on the STM Forum.
I asked him, he’s a keen footballer, so I said, “Okay, with all your affiliate knowledge, if you wanted to become a professional footballer, suddenly, how would you go about that?”
And he thought about it for like half a second. Then he went, “Well I’d find the country in the world with the shittiest professional football teams and I’d move there.”
That’s a good approach. That’s what poker players would call table selection.
Table Selection
You want to look at the area you are intending to enter and you want to figure out a place that is so underserved that you can dominate it much more easily.
A lot of people go super competitive.
A lot of filmmakers, I’m gonna use film-making as an example quite a lot, I know it well, will tend to go for like an action movie or a super heavy issues movie about the plight of the Argentinian Chihuahua or something similar.
These are all massively over-served movies.
I know one guy who makes a full-time living as an independent film-maker by making movies about teenage girls having magical adventures with horses.
There’s a lot of teenage girls out there who are really obsessed with horses.
There were very, very few young, edgy 20-something film-makers who wear black. No resemblance. Who want to make these movies.
Another great example recently came from politics. Ruth Davidson, in the UK politics, clearly wants to become the head of one of the largest UK parties of Conservative Party.
She has chosen to do so by becoming head of the Scottish Conservative Party, which might sound like a very big job.
No one wanted it because the Conservatives were utterly hated.
And at the time she took the job, they had like 2 politicians out of 50 in the country of Scotland because Scotland hates the Conservative Party.
She took that on because there was very little competition, she has done it really well. And, she is now being talked about, at the age of 40, as being the next leader of the country.
Spying: Who’s The Customer?
Once you know your soft market, the next thing you need to know, and this might again, sound really obvious but it isn’t, you need to know who your customer is.
Now, if you are, once again, if you are a film-maker, you would think that your customer was the guy on the beanbag or in the chair, at the cinema, who is watching the film.
And you would be dead wrong.
He is not your customer, he is not your customer’s customer. And, he is only sometimes, your customer’s customer’s customer.
The actual customers for a film-maker are the 400 or so people, who gather twice a year at Cannes and at the American Film Market and they gather to buy films.
They are the only people who will buy films and pay sufficiently large sums of money for them that you can actually stand a chance of making your budget back.
And what a lot of people will do, is they will make their film, they will assume they are making it for a cinema goer, then they will discover the cinema goer cannot possibly pay them.
Then they will go to one of these places and they will find out that they’ve done something that means that the 400 people, who are the only people who could possibly buy it, don’t want it.
And then they have wasted $50,000 / $500,000 / $5 million.
I’ve seen this happen.
Who Are You Targeting
You need to know who your customer are. You need to know exactly who you are targeting.
And this is where affiliates have a huge advantage. People who are not affiliates tend to think of customers as this big aggregate block but we are used to targeting.
We are used to sub-targeting. We are used to going, “Okay, so if I need to get into this seat I need to get the swing voters. And that means let’s look at the demographics. Okay, I need to target people who are over 40, who have pets, and who are concerned about the environment.”
This is all stuff that is very, very natural to us.
Spying: Talk, Talk, Talk
And other things that are very natural to us is talking. As I am currently demonstrating.
Affiliates have two huge advantages here over anyone else.
The first one is that if you want to dominate any of these competitive industries, one of the barriers is usually that you need to know people.
And, that almost always, means that you need to travel to where those people are and you need to actually get to know them.
Now affiliates, we have the means, we have the resources and we are used to travelling all over the world.
Most people will not do that.
Most people who want to be in politics will not necessarily travel to the Democratic National Convention and all the other major conventions they need to go to, to meet the movers and shakers.
It’s only the really dedicated few who will do it because it’s difficult, it’s expensive if you’re not already full-time on this stuff .
And when you’re there, you have another huge advantage. This is a stupidly diverse crowd.
Affiliate marketing is a Diverse Crowd
Affiliate marketing is a massively diverse crowd.
I would not be at all surprised later on in the evening, when I’m ranting about my VR cat stretching application. And how it’s going to change the world.
I would not be surprised to discover that the person I’m talking to is a single mother from Turkmenistan, who has managed to work away to a new life through affiliate marketing.
Other people who are good at networking, even in these very competitive industries, tend to mostly be good at networking with people who are like them.
If you look at the partnership of a top law firm, which is a super difficult place to get to, you’ll tend to find that, essentially, it’s the same guy in twelve different suits.
They’re very, very used to networking with people who are like them.
We as affiliates are very used to networking with everyone. So use that to your advantage.
Spying: What’s “Good”
Finally, the last thing you need to spy is what’s good. And this is where we have an unbeatable advantage over the competition.
Right, I’m going to tell you a story. Then, I’m gonna ask everyone who recognizes that story to raise their hands.
Here it goes.
You have come up with a genius idea for a campaign, you have worked super hard at it. And, you have gotten the best payouts you possibly can before you start running.
You have had your landing pages exquisitely crafted, you have set aside a huge budget because you absolutely know you’re gonna make a ton on this thing.
And, you launched it, you wait. Then about 1,000 bucks later you go, “Yeah, that’s a dead loss, that’s never gonna convert ever.”
Anyone had that experience? Yeah one or two people.
Yeah, yeah. I’m seeing some hands yeah.
And likewise, you’ve had the other one where it’s 4am, you’re pissed. Your girlfriend or boyfriend has been getting on at you about why the affiliate marketing thing isn’t working yet.
You slap a campaign up there because you just saw an email about it.
You go to bed, you wake up the next morning, you go, “What the hell did I do? Quick, kill it before it wastes any more money.”
You look at your volume stats and you discover that your 4-figures up already and counting.
We Know We Don’t Know What’s Good
And that turns out to be your most profitable campaign this year.
We know that we don’t know what’s good.
Say, you want to be a novelist, for example, I think a couple of hands go up when I said that.
Do you need to have a brilliant, beautiful writing prose style? Go read the first Harry Potter book. No, you don’t.
Do you need to have compelling plots that are just going to keep the pages turning? Go read a book by Martin Amos. He’s incredibly successful. And personally, I can’t read it without falling asleep.
Do you need to have a book that has entirely relatable characters? Anyone read Handmaid’s Tale? Yeah, not exactly.
Offer: Get Good
You need to figure out exactly what makes you and your output good and then you need to get good? And this is where affiliates again have an unbeatable advantage.
We have all learned affiliate marketing. Learning affiliate marketing is really hard. It is something you have to do by yourself.
Sure, there are things like the affiliate mastery challenge out there, but still it only teaches you a bit of what you need to know to really get to grips with any vertical.
You’ve still got to learn, develop.
We’ve all done the thing where we set up our first campaign and we put the affiliate networks main URL in as our post backlink. And then we copy pasted the images to our affiliate network, and somehow it didn’t work.
Then we pasted in the URL into the traffic source and that turned out to just be a porn site we had open on another tab.
And then we started the campaign. We go, “Why the hell didn’t thing work?”
And then we had to figure it all out from scratch by ourselves.
That means we are all phenomenally good at learning. So I don’t have much to say on this point about getting good aside from that you have to do it.
You Have To Believe In Your Skills
And you have to believe, and this is something affiliates are not necessarily good at, you have to believe that you can get to world-class with your skills.
There’s an interesting story of a guy called Dam, who is a web designer. He developed a thing called the Dam plan, which one or two of you may have heard of.
He’d read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, he’d read about 10,000 hours to become an expert. And he thought he would try this out.
He only lasted 6,000 hours before he got caught by the thing I mentioned in slide 1, did his back in, and couldn’t play golf anymore.
But in that 6,000 hours, he managed to get his golf handicap to better, than many professional golfers.
If you put in a lot of deliberate practice, you hire coaches, which is another thing we can do as affiliates because we have money, you can achieve remarkable things.
If you want to learn more about how to learn effectively, read Tim Ferris’ 4-hour Chef. Take the course Learning How To Learn, it’s amazing.
Offer: The Money Route
Okay, so another advantage we have as affiliates, and another one we really need to use in any of these industries is we are not afraid to ask for money.
We’ve all done this, we’ve all kind of phoned up our affiliate manager and said, “Yeah, I need a bump on this offer.”
And, we’ve all gone into this with the expectation of getting paid. And we forget how much of a big barrier that is to most people.
How much they will go, “Oh, I’m not good enough yet, I couldn’t possibly charge.” Or, they will give away stuff for free in the hopes of getting exposure.
I’ve done this both ways. If you’re thinking of dominating one of these industries, one of these highly competitive industries, go in there confident and charged.
It works a hundred times better.
People esteem what they do not get for free, you are more likely to get fans. People will treat you better, people we’ll tell other people about what you have created, on what you are doing much more.
Now, it’s worth noting, there is one way to give away some stuff for free and still get to the top of these industries.
And it’s an approach that works particularly well if you are looking at an industry like professional sports or like being a cameraman or like anything where you need to be known as an expert, and then hired by people on the base of your expertise.
Being An Affiliate Marketer
Well, that worked very well for politics, very well for social enterprises. And that way is an obscure approach called being an affiliate marketer.
So, let me explain.
There was a cameraman in the UK, whose name I will not reveal because I don’t want to send him a flood of inappropriate traffic, who started out as a cameraman for BBC Wales.
And he was working but he was doing exciting jobs Like he would get called up and say, “Oh, hello boy oh, yeah there are, they’re re-opening the post office in Kenarvan, can you come down and take a few shots? Thanks very much, bye.”
He would go down and he would watch the local, non-entity snip a ribbon over the local post office. And he would shoot all this terribly professionally.
He started making reviews of the cameras that he used. And putting them out because he knew that quite a lot about cameras, being a professional cinematographer.
People started paying attention to these. And then, someone that told him about Amazon link, Amazon affiliate links.
We know they’re only 5%, right? But 5% of a $7,000 camera still adds up to a decent chunk of money.
Internet Marketing
So he started making more reviews and you’ll be recognising this. This is the classic SEO based affiliate strategy.
He started making more reviews because he had an income stream, he could now make the reviews better.
And, he could buy more expensive cameras. He could start making short films to test these things, which also incidentally showed off his cinematography skills.
So more people started learning about him. So his SEO started going up. Now when you typed into Google, top cameraman, you would get this guy’s name.
And the next thing you know, instead of getting calls from BBC South Wales, he’s getting calls from the Discovery Channel saying things like, “Hi, we hear you’re the best cameraman in the world. So what we want you to do is we’re going to jump into a live volcano and we want you to film it, are you a go?”
And he went, “Hell yeah!”
Now he’s making camera reviews at the side of a live volcano and the entire thing cycles around. You’ll recognize this.
This is the classic internet marketing guru root.
It works in these incredibly competitive industries. It works very well because they are incredibly competitive.
Everyone wants an edge. Everyone wants to know how you get to the next rung. And by telling people how you got to where you are, you will gain that a reputation as being an expert, which will help get you to get hired, which will get you to the next one and so on and so on and so on.
It works in internet marketing and internet marketing is most crowded. It’s the most guru crowded nation in the world.
It works far better in most of these other niches.
Offers: How Weird Is Too Weird
Now, if you are a creative or if you are trying to choose how you’re going to approach your attack on your industry, you’re gonna need to choose a product.
And as affiliates, we actually have a disadvantage here, because we would naturally think, okay, we’ve spied the product, we’ve spied our industry.
What we’re going to do is we’re either going to copy the best-selling thing or we going to really carefully market research something that we know works. And to hell with what we like, we’re going with what we know the customer likes.
I have no good reason for why this is the case but that is a terrible idea. I have spoken to multiple, incredibly successful businessman, in all creative fields.
And one thing they all agree about, is that if you are making something that you intend to release to the world, you are far, far better making something that you like.
Everyone is Going To Want It
Even if it sounds fucking weird and you have no information anyone else is going to want it.
Then you are making something that is carefully tested, I know this sounds strange. All I can say is I’ve seen it happen and time and time again, I’ve done this myself.
I have made carefully market tested films time and time again they mostly flopped.
My most recent project is a VR game. It is a horror game. It is too scary for three-quarters of my audience to play. I know this from the reviews.
It is brutally difficult, so it’s too difficult for further 3-quarters of them to play because they die 30 times before the exit the opening room.
It has a plot that is based on a combination and obscure Jewish mysticism and the life and times of the Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
I can see people falling asleep in the back already.
This thing is doing astonishingly well, the most successful product I’ve ever released.
Weird Really Works
There was an even better example of this. There was a board game released recently.
A guy put up a Kickstarter for a board game he called Kingdom Death. And he said so, the first thing you should know is this thing’s gonna be a little bit more expensive than most board games, it’s gonna be 300 bucks. It’s gonna come in a box this big and your postman is gonna need a truck to carry it up the street.
As for the actual board game itself, well mostly what’s going to happen is that you’re going to get eaten by horrible monsters, you’re gonna starve to death, you’re gonna go mad or you’re gonna die of despair.
Sounds awesome, right?
Put up for Kickstarter. Last time I checked, it had raised $12 million. Weird really works.
Campaign: Take Massive Action
Now we move into the campaign stage.
If there was an interview for affiliate marketing, it would go a bit like this, right? Question one would be about the dress code, obviously.
Yeah, so the interviewer asked, “Mr. Hancock are you prepared for the dress code we have in this office?”
And I’m like, “Yep, I have my pair of boxer shorts with the mysterious stain and the grease down the side that came from I don’t know where. I’m prepared to sit around and wear absolutely nothing else and scratch at my chest hair.”
And the interviewer would be like, “Yes, excellent good taste.”
Second question, are you prepared to fail? And then, are you prepared to fail again, fail some more, fail again. Fail on Thursday, fail again, f*ck up on Friday. Have a lack of success on Saturday, fail on Sunday.
And then, just for encore, completely fuck up on Monday and have absolutely nothing work. That be a perfectly normal week?
And all of us who are affiliates here, know that the answer is well, what is the answer?
Someone tell me the answer. The answer is yes.
We are completely prepared for that. That is, yeah, I’m seeing nods. Yeah, this is normal as affiliates.
Affiliates Are Prepared To Fail
We are used to taking enormous action and we are used to failing time and time again.
And this is where we have a huge separating factor.
If you’re going into any one of these industries worth battering that as much as possible, use it as much as possible, take absolutely phenomenally massive action.
Because most people, they will write one novel, it won’t work. They’ll go, “Well, clearly I’m not meant to be a novelist then.”
Many of the most successful novelists I know are writing 5 or 6 novels a year.
Ridiculous numbers.
You’ll go into politics, you’ll fail to get elected to your local council once, you’ll go, “Yeah well it was never going to happen.”
As affiliates, we know that what we do is we just keep going, we keep pounding at that go button.
Out Producing The Competition
And, everything I’ve seen tells me that success, in any one of these highly competitive industries, is primarily correlated to out producing the competition wildly.
This applies double if you are looking to do something like being an actor or be a cameraman or something where technically you would be employed by someone else.
A lot of actors, they just sit around when they’re not working. They do it, they go for auditions but otherwise, “Oh no darling, I’m resting, it’s the creative process.”
Don’t do that.
Many of the most successful actors up and coming right now, are so successful because they started their own projects anytime they were bored.
Vin Diesel, who is actually a genius director as well, by the way, has done this repeatedly.
Felicia Day has done this. She is a very, very successful actress in TV right now.
She’ll get involved in anything, so anyone calls her up. Not anything, anything with quality she will just accept loads and loads of roles, continually bash out massive, massive quality, massive, massive volume of work.
Campaigns: Visibility Is Life
At the same time, the other thing that we know as affiliates is this stuff isn’t gonna market itself.
We have AIDA, Attention Interest Desire Action.
You have heard me talk about this on STM if you’re on STM. The four components of any successful campaign.
You get attention from the banner, interest, and desire from the landing page, desire is built up for the offer.
And then you get people to take action on the offer by signing up, and then you get your conversion.
Each and every one of those steps is unbelievably vital for this.
If you are trying to become the president of Germany, well you need to get attention, first of all, so people know you exist.
Then you need to develop an interest in your platform, you need to get people to desire change. And then you need to get them to take action at the polling booths and vote for you.
However, this is how this stuff works. This is our job. Jeremy Corbyn has just done this brilliantly in the UK. Donald Trump, regardless of what you may think of his policies has done it brilliantly in the US.
50% Marketing, 50% Creation
In terms of how much you should spend working and creating, compared to how much time you should spend marketing yourself, the rule I’ve heard, again and again, it’s 50/50.
50% marketing, 50% creation. Most people who are not affiliates will really struggle with the 50% marketing thing.
Campaigns: Analyse
And the other thing that they will really struggle with, is they will struggle with analysing what the hell is going on.
As affiliates, we are incredibly used to drilling down to our stats but if you are going into politics, for example.
Almost none of your competition are gonna sit down with their Facebook campaigns after you have attempted to run for your first seat.
And, almost none of them are gonna drill down and go, “Well okay, so we didn’t win overall but I can’t help but notice that we got a 95% vote ratio in among 65-year-old grannies, who are interested in handguns and martial arts.”
So okay, we’ve got the bad-ass granny demographic, how can we use that?
Drill down, do your affiliate thing. And you will come out with a massive, massive competitive advantage.
Don’t forget to use things like lookalike audiences on Facebook, all this stuff.
And finally, here is the biggest affiliate advantage of all. Lots of people in these industries, achieve one success or two successes.
They will make a hit song., they will win a tournament. And, they will have a novel.
Go pretty viral. They will release an info product about photography. They’ll make like 60,000 bucks and they’ll go, “Wow that was a huge success.”
Scaling: When It’s Time You’ll Know
We know that what you do when you have something like that, is you scale. And most other people have never heard of the concept.
So if you are doing any of these things, if you’re going into any of these industries and you have a hit, remember your affiliate training.
Scale that thing.
Tell everyone you won that tournament. Get your Facebook campaigns on for your hit song, get it out there, everywhere.
Start calling every radio station on the planet, telling them about it. If you’re a painter, you just made it if fantastic painting, get prints done.
Get your full-on e-commerce going.
One good painting can make a lifetime’s career for a painter if you can sell it to enough people.
Scaling: Profit x Crowd
The formula I always like to think of with any business is that you have two components.
You have something that you can sell for more than it costs to get a customer for that or provides you more money than it costs you to get a customer.
And then all you need is an infinite supply of customers.
Lots of people in your competition will be able to do the first part. They will be able to come up with something that is profitable, once in a while.
What they won’t be able to do is to then tell everybody in the world about it. We can do that.
Well everyone who’s on Facebook, anyway.
So, final words.
These slides have all been terribly, terribly famous people emitting mild clichés and you might be wondering why the hell I chose them.
The reason is simple.
Famous People Were People
All of these people were people. They were people like the people sitting in the front row here, like the people sitting in the back there who I can barely see.
Like the guy lying on the beanbag here. They were all people just like you.
And the thing is you’re at Affiliate World. There are people walking around here, who are almost as successful, if not as successful as the people on those slides.
There are people like StackMan who has turned his affiliate career into being an absolutely top and almost the number one iOS game developer.
You have people like Phillip, the guy with the beard wandering around doing filming, who founded a non-governmental aid organisation that received an award that was previously given to the Dalai Lama.
You have people like CMDeal. Chris who will be at this stage later, who has founded multiple 8-figure, 9-figure companies, who has casually entered the publishing industry and crushed it because he was bored, essentially.
These people are affiliates just like you.
If you want to do something that is incredibly hard, yeah, if you want to achieve your dreams, if you want to do the thing that you’ve always thought you would love to do but figured, it’s really, really hard to do.
If you want to do the thing that all your friends and your parents, your relatives, have said, “Yeah, no, don’t do that. Just stick with this stable income.”
You have the skills, you have the best skills of anyone in the world to do it.
Get out there, get it done.
Thank you very, very much.
