Bonus #24

Ellen Yin20min

Ellen Yin

00:00

Hey, welcome back to another bonus episode of cubicle to CEO, the podcast where we ask successful entrepreneurs the business questions you can't google. I'm your host, Ellen Yin. And in this week's episode with Molly Keyser, she shares how she was able to turn her students into affiliates for her program that increased her yearly revenue for her core sales by 10%. And while 10% may seem like a small number in context for her case study that amounted to multiple six figures, because her course makes $2 million a year.

Ellen Yin

00:39

Now, as a complement to that interview, I thought it would be interesting to talk about the flip side of the coin. So what it's like actually being the affiliate for someone else's course or online offer, whether that's a live challenge, a bundle launch or anything like that. I have had the privilege and the pleasure of affiliating for many of my friends before. And although these days we don't typically do affiliate only offers anymore because we pivoted our company to a media business. And that is the primary way that we now monetize, I've still been able to apply a lot of the skills and strategies that I use to become a top affiliate for many of the launches that I did participate in, and translate that into the paid partnerships and sponsored content that we do now as a media company.

Ellen Yin

01:27

So to give you a little bit of context, I am going to share with you today, three of my favorite ways that we have landed ourselves on the top of the leaderboard for the different launches that we've participated in as an affiliate. And particularly, I'll be pulling from my experiences affiliating for my friend Selena Soo's impacting millions launch in 2022, as well as the Be On TV bootcamp hosted by Jen Gottlieb and Chris Winfield, which I affiliated for, I believe, twice, actually. And for both of these launches, I landed in the top three for their respective affiliate leaderboards. And this was oftentimes in a pool of dozens, if not more than 100 affiliates, some with list sizes two to five times the size of our own list. So these were big players in the industry that we were collaborating alongside of. And it was really cool to be able to still land in that top three, because we were able to implement some of these strategies. So let me share with you the three things that worked really well for us in case any of you are inspired to become an affiliate for other people's courses, or for the courses that you've participated in, in the past as a student, after listening to Molly's case study this week on the podcast.

Ellen Yin

02:54

Alright, So strategy number one is to create your own bonus incentives for anyone that you refer to a program. So typically, when you are participating in a live launch, the program creator will have their own bonuses that they're providing to any students who enroll in the course or program. But as an affiliate, you often will also have the opportunity to create your own bonuses alongside of anything that's already being offered, that you only gift to people who join the program through your link. So it's like an extra thank you for the people who choose to support your business by joining through your affiliate link. So this works really well, especially if you're able to create bonuses that complement the main product that's being sold the main course the main program, and thinking about what types of tools, templates, resources, or additional trainings would help someone that I'm referring to this course would help them actually implement what they learn in that course, faster, more efficiently, more easily. Right.

Ellen Yin

04:05

So to give you a concrete example of this, when we were an affiliate for Selena Soo's impacting millions launch in 2022, that program was a publicity program, teaching students how to land press features, right how to get into the media, whether that was through newspapers, online articles, magazines, podcasts, interviews, you name it. And so when we're thinking about the end goal for the students that are joining the program, they're wanting to get more visible. They're wanting to use the media as a way to get in front of new eyeballs, new audiences. We were thinking, what if we could help them fast track their path to their first media win? So that basically, upon joining the program, they're already guaranteed to have at least one media win under their belt? Because we all know it's easier to build momentum when there's already something created right? it like when you think about a snowball rolling down the hill, that small snowball starts the avalanche. But as it continues to roll down the hill, it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So it's always easier to go get the next media win than the first media went.

Ellen Yin

05:14

And so to help the people that we were referring into the program from our community, to get over that first obstacle of okay, I need to land my first media win, right to build that confidence to build that credibility. We actually hired a writer, a journalist who used to be the editor of South Africa's Cosmo magazine. So very prestigious, right? Media publication, background, and we actually hired them to write an article on the catalysts that made people make the leap from employee to entrepreneur. First of all, we thought this was pretty in line with our brand cubicle, the CEO, right. And if you're a loyal listener of our show that, you know, we always ask our guests for their 32nd version of how they ultimately made that leap from working for someone else to working for themselves. And what that catalyst was that led to that decision. So we thought we could create an article around that kind of a roundup feature.

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