If you have your online course, then the main question is always how to sell it. One of the options is to sell online courses with the affiliates, people who already have the base of followers and established the relationship with them. Get more tips from Dan Ardebili via @MarinaBarayeva #onlinecourses #affiliates #onlinemarketing #smallbusiness #entrepreneur #creativeentrepreneur #smallbiz #mompreneur #womaninbiz

If you have your online course, then the main question is always how to sell it.

One of the options is to sell it through affiliates, people who already have the base of followers and established the relationship with them. Then they could recommend your online course. Their followers are happy, and you both get money at the end.

In this episode, Dr. Dan Ardebili shares how to sell online courses with the affiliates.

Best Selling Author Dr. Dan Ardebili along with his partner Ben Littlefield are the owners and founders of the 2 RockStars, a multi-million-dollar digital media publishing, training and consulting firm.

For years they have been teaching people all across the world how to play digital monopoly by building and owning their very own digital assets online.

'Stop trying to make it perfect and just do it. There is no step 2 or 3 other than just doing' ~ Dan ArdebiliClick To Tweet

It’s like playing the board game Monopoly in real life. Instead of trying to gather up all the red hotels on the board you build simple digital assets (which can be courses, simple 1-3 page websites, software, etc.) on the web that pay you month after month forever.

In this episode, we will cover:

  • [00:22] About the episode and Dr. Dan Ardebili
  • [02:21] Dan shares how he left his family business to work on his own
  • [04:05] When you think that you get $200 per hour, but in fact, it’s just $20-$30
  • [05:33] Dan’s answer when people ask him ‘How do you avoid mistakes and stuff like that?’
  • [06:20] His companies’ bankruptcy, earning good money after that, but not feeling fulfilled
  • [09:52] Dan hired a coach, and he wrote a book with her, which he had to sell somehow so then he started learning about online marketing
  • [11:34] His first experience with coaching online and selling the online courses
  • [13:38] Dan’s experience with selling the online courses with the affiliates
  • [16:04] Where to find the affiliates to sell your online courses
  • [18:42] How to reach out the affiliates
  • [20:12] What to say when you reach out the affiliates
  • [23:16] How to build the relationship with the affiliates before they sell your online course
  • [24:55] When is the right time to mention that you want people to sell you online course
  • [27:22] Pick the affiliate platform to make the payments
  • [29:40] How much commission to offer to the affiliates
  • [32:22] What materials to give to affiliates
  • [34:43] What to start with to sell online courses with the affiliates
  • [37:40] How to find Dan online
  • [38:04] For the show notes go to marinabarayeva.com and subscribe to the Marketing for Creatives show

3 First Steps to Sell Online Courses with the Affiliates

  • Look for the affiliates online: Google, social media, search for other courses
  • Commit to reaching at least two people a day, who can potentially become your affiliate, within next two weeks
  • Reach out to those people and offer help or bring value to them to start building the relationship before you ask about selling your online course

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If you have your online course, then the main question is always how to sell it. One of the options is to sell online courses with the affiliates, people who already have the base of followers and established the relationship with them. Get more tips from Dan Ardebili
If you have your online course, then the main question is always how to sell it. One of the options is to sell online courses with the affiliates, people who already have the base of followers and established the relationship with them. Get more tips from Dan Ardebili
If you have your online course, then the main question is always how to sell it. One of the options is to sell online courses with the affiliates, people who already have the base of followers and established the relationship with them. Get more tips from Dan Ardebili

Download podcast transcript [PDF] here:

Resources from this interview:

Connect with Marina Barayeva:

How to Sell Online Courses with The Affiliates – Interview Transcription

If you have your online course, then the main question is always how to sell it. One of the options is to sell online courses with the affiliates, people who already have the base of followers and established the relationship with them. Get more tips from Dan Ardebili via @MarinaBarayeva #onlinecourses #affiliates #onlinemarketing #smallbusiness #entrepreneur #creativeentrepreneur #smallbiz #mompreneur #womaninbizMarina Barayeva:

Dan, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us your story.

Dan Ardebili:

Tell you my story. All right. How far do you want me to go back? When we go back when I was a baby?

Marina Barayeva:

Maybe a little older (laughter).

Dan Ardebili: 

Alright. I’ll start when I was about two years old, because it’s kind of fun. So, you can kind of hear my whole story. I was born in Denmark. I don’t know if you knew that. And my parents moved to the U.S.. I live in California. They move to northern California at the time. I’m in Southern California in a place called Coda to Caza now, which I’m sure you’ve heard of the Orange County housewives or whatever it’s called, the other Sea wives or whatever. That’s where first film was here.

So, Northern California. My parents moved to the U.S. for the American dream. They opened up a restaurant in Northern Californian, Dublin California is called the Copper Skillet. It’s been there for over 30 years.

I grew up in a restaurant. They were always working. And I know that I didn’t want to do that when I got older. They were always working. So, all other people were going on vacations and doing stuff. We really didn’t. We would go maybe an hour away from home because they had to go back to their job.

There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m just saying that for me I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t have kids at the time, but I knew that I wanted a better way, I wanted more freedom. I didn’t know what it was at the time. But I knew there was something that I wanted.

From there I actually started my own personal training business, because, again keep in mind, I could have taken over the restaurant. They wanted me to.

But I wanted the time freedom. I wanted big money at the time. I wanted to be on MTV Cribs and that kind of stuff. That’s what I grew up on.

I’m like ‘Oh, that’s awesome! I want to be one of those guys.’ And I was like ‘OK. Well, what’s out there?’

I started, again, because I loved training at the time and I was bodybuilding myself. I was 250 pounds, bold guy working at nightclubs and bouncer in San Francisco, having a good time.

And I started my own personal training business. I thought ‘Oh, this could be it,’ because you can charge $100-$200 an hour to train somebody. But you don’t take into account that you first got to sign those people, you got to find them. Then you got to drive to their house or at a club that you’re working at. Then you add that all up and you’re getting $20-$30 dollars an hour.

Also, if you’re sick or something you’ve got to call in. And not only you have to call one place. You have to call each client and let them know that you can’t come in. That’s it’s horrible. I knew that wasn’t the route.

Then I got introduced to a multilevel marketing company. I never heard of anything like that. Network marketing and I was just like ‘Well, what is this?’ This is kind of cool.

I thought that was the answer because I always wanted to work out of a briefcase, have a cell phone and a laptop and work out of a coffee shop because I thought that was cool.

I lived in San Francisco for a little while, and they had those cool coffee before Starbucks was really around at the time.

So, I started doing that. I thought I arrived the company I learned so many amazing things though.

And that’s the thing. It’s like people always say ‘How do you avoid mistakes and stuff like that?’ And I’m always like ‘You know, mistakes are good because that prepares you for what’s next.’

It will be like if you’re exercising and this is the first time. Like right now, I don’t know if you train or not, but I have the feeling if I give you 200-pound dumbbell and drop it on top of you it’s probably going to collapse on you.

Marina Barayeva:

I’ll get broken!

Dan Ardebili:

Exactly. You’ll get broken. But if I trained you over the course of months and months and months to at least be able to hold it, whether or not, you pull it up and down.

You’ll be able to prevent it from crushing you because now you’re strong enough to do it. And that’s how I look at mistakes. It helps you helps you with that.

The company went bankrupt. But here’s the cool thing that I’ve learned: I created my first website when I was in my personal training business. Then I created another Web site when I was in the multi-level marketing business.

And my site, which we actually call street cred today, we called it street cred because I had created like this credibility kind of site with all the things that we were doing and why you should join us and stuff like that. I was getting comments from the top people in the company saying ‘You know, your website looks better than ours.’

I’m not a web designer. I used Yahoo web builder, which was like… I don’t know, five bucks or something to use, some cheap amount, or some like that.

Then after that, that company went bankrupt. I had to find something new.

I went into a real estate. And I used a lot of the strategies a lot of the things that I had learned throughout the years of doing all these other things. In real estate, I started generating business using the web. I was generating leads to the point where people were calling me all day.

I made a rule: OK. I’ll pick up the phone. I knew nothing about real estate by the way. I was just faking until I make it basically. So, I would make a rule: if I was in the shower, I would get out of the shower and grab the phone and answer it, because it was a lot harder to call people back if they just left you a message or probably called somebody else too.

Doing that I was able to generate over I say 45, but as more maybe 30, I don’t know, I always forget it was either 30 grand or forty-five grand in my first 60 or no, first 45 days or something like that. People were just like ‘It’s going to take you a year to make like five grand in that business.’

I was just like ‘Boom!’ I was like ‘Oh my God! What are you doing?’ Like this is crazy, but that’s how I learned how to do that.

Then I made a lot of money, and I was unhappy. I knew there that wasn’t fulfilling me. I knew there had to be something else out there.

So, I was searching, and I ended up joining the platinum partners with Tony Robbins. I traveled around and did a lot of cool stuff. Met some of my best friends today and mentors from that.

Because of that trip, kind of jump into that right there, because I don’t want to take up too much time explains. I know you want to jump into the meat and potatoes. But my coach of that time told me that I should write a book. I was like ‘OK.’

And the little backstory on that is because I was unhappy, I was making money, but I wasn’t happy. One thing that fulfilled me, she actually kind of pulled out of me, was that every time I would share with people and talk about things then I would actually be happy, I’ll be excited like ‘Oh, that’s awesome!’

Because when I was in the real estate business, people come into my office and the very end. That was because I wanted to be at the end so I can have no distractions because I’m just all over the place and people come into my office first.

They walk to the end of the office, come to my office to talk to me even though they were supposed to go to the broker’s office first, talk to them, and say ‘Hi.’ And the broker would get upset, be like ‘Why they go to your office first?’ I was like ‘I don’t know. They want to talk to me about life.’

My coach said to write a book. I wrote two books. I hired an author’s coach to teach me how to do it because I’m really big on shortcutting the success. Just like you are we’re doing this podcast so we can shortcut people success, right? Help them get there a lot faster.

So that’s what I did as I hired a book coach cost me like 15 grand. I spend a weekend with her. She taught me how to create my book. We created it while we were there. She helped pull it out of me. She didn’t write anything. She helped pull it out of me. And I did that.

After that, what happens if you write a book? You’ve got to sell it, right? I’m like ‘OK. What do I do to sell it? And she’s like ‘Oh, you write press releases.’

And again, this is 2006, around there 2007. She’s like ‘You write press releases, you get on radio shows.’ Podcasting wasn’t really that big at that time. You get on radio shows, and you do all this stuff, your local TV. I looked, and it was I ten thousand dollars for a PR agent for press releases and some junk like that. That I’m like ‘Seriously? There’s got to be something better out there.’

I was like ‘You know what, I’m gonna start research on this stuff myself.’ I started studying. I went on Internet Marketing forums. I bought any courses I can find, and there wasn’t a lot at the time. I studied YouTube, social media, that time there was Twitter and MySpace. Facebook wasn’t really… I don’t even remember if it was there or if it was just starting out or whatever. But I was doing all that.

Then, at the same time, I was offering relationship coaching, and I started my own podcast doing that. I also started a blog as well. I created my first membership site. It was very slow at the time because, again, the market here in the U.S. crashed in 2006, 2007, 2008. It was really bad.

And the clients that I didn’t get were happy, but they were more focused not on their marriage or relationship. They were more like I need to make money because I don’t know where my next paycheck will come from. I just got laid off, or my business isn’t doing that well, and it turned into my client said ‘Well, I need help. I need more business.’ And they started saying ‘Can you help me?’

I was listening to the universe, and the universe was saying ‘Hey, this person is willing to pay you money in order to help them with their online marketing.’ I was like ‘OK.’

I listened to the universe. I’m a big believer in listening to the universe the multiverse whatever you want to call it. I was like ‘OK.’ And they pay me like $1500. I got a couple of clients doing that. Then it turned into I was helping people on the forums, in the marketing forums explaining to them what I was doing. I was just excited to share. No other reason.

Then they started begging me ‘Can I pay you money to teach me what you did?’ And I was like ‘OK.’

I started teaching them, and they’re like ‘Oh, create a product.’ And I was like ‘OK.’ So I created a product. And that one product, which was called Google Love, which came out in 2009-2010, I sold it for $7 because that was the going rate for those books and courses. 100-page eBook took me 4 days to create. It did over a hundred thousand dollars in less than 30 days. I want to say, two weeks three weeks something like that. I mean it’s just was the beginning.

That was the universe and the multiverse saying ‘Hey, dummy, this is what you need to be doing.’ And the rest is history.

Marina Barayeva:

How did you get to the affiliate marketing?

Dan Ardebili:

It goes hand in hand. Now if you’re saying like how did I start promoting other people’s products or how did I get affiliates. First off, I kind of just fell into it. Because finding affiliates… I didn’t even search for them.

All I did I put my product in a couple of places. There was a couple of forums and a couple of marketplaces that had affiliates looking at the products, and they were all over the web. You can find them all over the place for every niche. Like ClickBank.

Look at ClickBank. There’s pretty much something for everything. You want to sell your e-book or your course on how to create a chicken coop or how to wash your clothes in case the world ends, and you got to go like wash your clothes in the… I don’t even know what you want, in a bucket with a rock, in the woods. There’s something for that. There’s something for everything out there.

I posted my product there, affiliates found it, saw it and liked it, and they’re like ‘Hey, I’m going to go sell it.’ And all of a sudden, I had like 2000 new customers.

I had no e-mail list. I had nothing. I didn’t reach out to anybody at first. So, all of a sudden I had 2000 people that wanted to learn from me. And to be honest, this will be great for your listeners as well, after I had 2000 customers I could stop there, and I could have just kept nurturing them and teaching them more and more and sell more and more. That was a six-figure business right there just with like 2000 buying customers.

Marina Barayeva:

That’s a long and adventurous story. Can you share with us a little bit more of the process how to sell online courses with the affiliates?

Dan Ardebili:

What do you mean by ‘How to sell?’ We can dive into that. What exactly do you mean? What would help your listeners?

Marina Barayeva:

Let’s say someone created an online course or they have the e-book, whatever. They have the product in their hands. And… like to offer it to their friends and that’s it? They want to sell it online.

Dan Ardebili:

Where to find affiliates? How to find them?

Marina Barayeva:

How to find them? What to offer? How does this go? Because we are zero in that. I don’t know anything about it, many listeners too.

Dan Ardebili:

So first off, where to find affiliates and how to find them. It kind of goes hand in hand. First, my favorite way is networking.

It’s always been for anything I’ve ever done. Because I always, and I don’t even know how this started, but years ago it’s like when something… life will go ahead and all of a sudden you do it, then you can use that same formula over and over again no matter what industry it is. That is networking. It’s huge. I can’t think of any way networking does not work.

What I love to do is I love to find somebody:

  • Who do I know that has that network already?
  • Who do I know that can point me in the right direction?

Doing that can get you there just like that. For instance, if you know one person, or even if you don’t know anybody you can use Google, you can search ClickBank, you can search YouTube. How much stuff!

People don’t understand how good they have, you go on YouTube and whether it’s like photographers or a painter or any kind of an artist or a makeup artist or any kind of anything you could imagine somebody has a YouTube channel for it. They might have a thousand subscribers. They might have 2000.

The thing is you have no idea where the audience is. If you look on YouTube for me, you’re going to find videos spread all over the place. You’re going to have different accounts that I’ve set up over the years. You’re going to see I maybe have a thousand subscribers on my YouTube channel. But you know what, my audience isn’t there, and that’s not what is really making the money. So, you can’t discount the fact that you find somebody on there that maybe only has a hundred subscribers.

If they have a good video or if they’re in your niche reach out to them. You never know who they know and that is networking right there.

You find one person and you ask them ‘Hey, I do this and I think we could complement each other, and maybe I can introduce you some people, and you can introduce me to some people’ And you just do that.

I’m still doing that today even though I networked with so many freaking big names. It’s like I have somebody right now, I just had a conversation on Facebook chat, and they’re like hey what affiliates do you know that I don’t know. I dropped in the top ten off the top of my head, and they’re like whoa those are some big names here are the ones I know. And I’m like, I know only one of those and we swapped it. We’re like ‘Hey, intro me to that person.’ It’s awesome.

Marina Barayeva:

How to reach out to those people? For example, you found someone who probably you can partner with and you need to offer them like ‘Can you sell my course?’ How do you tell them that? And what do you offer as an exchange?

Dan Ardebili:

I’ll answer with the first question first because my ADD will kick in and I won’t know what your other question was. (laughter) So bear with me, OK?

What I would do first is I would search the networks. I would search social media. YouTube has its own messenger. I haven’t used it in years though I have no idea, where but I remember you could reach people there.

You can find them on Facebook. Most people have their links on their web pages and stuff, or in other spots where they have their social media, they have Instagram, Pinterest. Wherever they are and wherever they’re active.

If they’re on Instagram and they haven’t made a post in three years or a year, I probably would reach out to them there, but also LinkedIn or Instagram, or Facebook, any of those or their website.

And this is what I do, so you’re stalking them. In a good, not a bad way. You’ve got to be careful. So, what I recommend, is reach out to them and in like two or three places at once. But what I would do is I would put on there:

‘Hey, I’m just reaching out to you. But I’ve also… (so you can copy and paste mostly the same message) but I also reached out to you on Instagram and Facebook because I’m not sure what you check. And I just want to reach out to you.’

I’ll do that across all three of them. So that way I’m not just the same message, all three spots without saying… it’s kind of like a recognize ‘Oh, I recognized, I just stalked you.’ So by doing that now, they’re not going to feel like you really stalked them like ‘Oh, that makes sense. I feel pretty fine about that.’

Now as far as, do you remember your question you were asking what do you say, well I would always look at it through their shoes:

  • What’s in it for them?
  • What is it that you can offer for them?

And I remember I got this advice a long time ago and I’ve used it still today. I think it’s brilliant. Like for instance, I bought a course from somebody on doing some Facebook ads and stuff like that I thought they were the cool person. I don’t know them personally. We hang out in the same circles like a reach out to somebody that knows them really good and say ‘Hey, intro me to this person.’ But I chose ‘Oh, you know what, I like them, I’m going to buy their course.’

That’s the first thing. Buy their course if they have of course. Subscribe to their list. Download something. So they know now that you’re somebody who is following them. And you let them know ‘Hey, I downloaded your course. I bought this from you’ or whatever. Now they’re more willing to hear you are opposed to just some spammer that saying ‘Oh, I can bring you leads and money and whatever, call me or whatever.’

I would start with that and I always kind of write my e-mails backward. What I mean by that, is I actually write out the e-mail and because nobody usually writes it with what’s in it for the other person first, it’s always what’s in it for you. So, what I do, is I find it easier just to write it the way I was going to write it, and then I go back to the beginning and I start adding about them.

After I’m done with the bottom part, I start writing what’s in it for them in the beginning. It could be something as simple as ‘Hey, I’m a voice coach’ or I’ve had people reach out to me like that ‘Hey I’m an Instagram star I know how to do that’ or whatever it is that maybe you’re good at that they’re not just let him know ‘Hey I’m a professional photographer and if you’re local I’d love to take your photo or give you some advice on some of your photos because I saw on your site one of these photos and I just want to let you know if you framed it like this will look amazing.’

Give them something that they’re going to go like ‘Wow. This person just reached out to me’ Like somebody just reached out to me today saying like ‘Oh, I like your style. What’s your biggest sticking point? Can I help you with your conversions?’ And I’m like ‘My biggest sticking point is reaching a billion dollars. Have you done that? Can you help me out? They’re like ‘No.’ I’m like ‘OK.’

Marina Barayeva:

When you reach them what to offer? We want to sell an online course?

Dan Ardebili:

Not in the beginning. No. For me, I like to reach out with… Again, it’s always different though.

It depends on who you’re reaching out to and what your offer is, but a lot of times it’s just touching base and saying ‘Hey, I like your style. I bought your course.’

And you can leave it at that and just ‘Hey, I’d love to jump on a quick call with you and see if I can help you, do something or vice versa.’ Because that might be the time that you add yours. ‘I have a course on this. I think we possibly could do something or at the very least we can point each other to some affiliates maybe you don’t know that I know’ or something like that.

It’s going to be different for each person. But, why not?

And also, today, I didn’t even think about this but I just was networking with somebody that reached out to me saying they love my pose and stuff that I was teaching them and I love theirs as they actually teach video stuff, how to do video and I’m okay with on audio in my video, but I hate video lighting. I’m like ‘Oh I can’t stand it.’ For indoor video lighting. But he’s an expert at that.

So we’re like ‘Hey, let’s jump on a call. Let’s jump on a Skype. And on Skype he can help me I can help him, and he can show me video settings on Skype video. Like ‘Hey, here let me show you the camera holding it up to the thing is we’re not local. That guy in Jersey or something. I’m in Southern California. So it’s pretty cool.

Marina Barayeva:

How many emails would you send? Or how many those types of connections, interactions would you have with the person till you mention your online course and that you want that person to be your affiliate?

Dan Ardebili:

It really depends. I would say, most of the time, I would actually mention my course or whatever I’m doing in there, but again, as long as you stack it with the what’s in it for them: you bought their course, you’re on their list, you love their style. Give them all this flattery.

Now you can say I have this and I’d love to talk and let’s jump on a quick Skype call or something like that. Don’t say ‘I want to pick your brain.’ That’s horrible.

Don’t ever say ‘I want to pick your brain.’ Because picking your brain is basically saying you want something from me or from that person, but you’re not giving anything in return.

Instead, for instance, yourself, if you reached out to me and said ‘I like your style I want to pick your brain’ I’ll be like ‘Yeah, we can schedule something at some point in the future, maybe never but possibly, you know, I’m just so busy.’

But when you come to me and you say ‘Hey, I got a podcast. I can interview you.’ Boom! Right there it’s exactly what you did. You didn’t like hide the fact that you have a podcast. You can be like ‘Oh let’s get on the thing and let’s and I don’t have anything but instead you said ‘Hey, I’ve got a podcast.’

So think of the ways that what’s in it for them and never come from what’s in it for you ‘Oh, well, you can sell my course and make some money.’ No. Because there’s plenty of opportunities out there.

People want to work with people they enjoy working with. They don’t really care so much about the money. Yeah, money is great, but there’s always going to be people you can do joint ventures or affiliate stuff or anything like that. For sure.

If you have your online course, then the main question is always how to sell it. One of the options is to sell online courses with the affiliates, people who already have the base of followers and established the relationship with them. Get more tips from Dan ArdebiliMarina Barayeva:

When you get to the point when you talk to the person, and you agreed that they could probably offer your course to other people, what conditions would you suggest? What to pay attention to? How much is the commission? Or how do you deal with this?

Dan Ardebili:

First off, you’re going to need the affiliate platform. You need an affiliate network or platform or something in order to make out the payments. Because you’re not going to want to do two things: one you’re not going to do this manually. You’re not going to be like ‘Oh, just send them to my PayPal or Stripe or whatever, and I’ll manually calculate payments and tell you how much you made. But you can’t see what I’m going just to pay.

That’s insane. Could you imagine, we just did the webinars, and we do all kinds, we just did a webinar the affiliate generated like over $83,000 or something in commissions is actually in total sales revenue. So half of that’s theirs.

It’s like over $40,000 commissions. Could you imagine for like ‘Oh, you can’t see how much you may we’re just going to tell you how much you made up.’ No. Because even though you’re not going to scam them out of that money, there’s always that ‘Well, I need to be able to see what I’m doing.’

You want to have some kind of a network. There are several out there you can use. My favorite… We’ve used several over the years. We actually helped launch one as well. That’s like one of the tops. I think they did their number two platform in their industry now or maybe they’re number one. I don’t remember.

So the one that I’d recommend today would be ThriveCart. I’m pretty impressed with ThriveCart. Right now, they have a special lifetime license where you don’t have to pay monthly. That’s great. And at some point, they’ll be monthly.

There also is another one called Zaxaa. It’s like a Z-A-X-A-A or something. That one was pretty decent too. One of those. It’s like $99 or $79 a month. Every single month. But it doesn’t have as much flexibility as ThriveCart does, which is a more new one and I know the owner as well.

But anyway, you set that up and now they will get the link. And because now they have their own affiliate link everything will be tracked to them. You can even set it if they get paid through PayPal that are automatically pay them as well. But that’s the first thing you need to do with that.

And what was the other part?

Marina Barayeva:

How much commission do you offer to them?

Dan Ardebili:

Treat your affiliates like your children. If you love your children. Obviously. If you don’t love your children don’t treat them like your children.

What I mean by that is that you want to treat them better than you treat yourself in a way. I’m not saying you should do that in real life, but you want to treat them as best as possible because they are feeding you.

If you have your online course, then the main question is always how to sell it. One of the options is to sell online courses with the affiliates, people who already have the base of followers and established the relationship with them. Get more tips from Dan Ardebili

They’re feeding you. You want to take care of them. You want to make it the easiest way possible for them to get paid. You don’t want to pay them every month or every year. At least for the first time, they do a promotion pay them a couple of days after they promote you. For the first time.

Then you can pay them every month after that. Because that’s pretty standard. Or every two weeks but feed them. Whenever you think about ‘How much should I pay them?’ Don’t think stingy. Minimum is 50%.

You could pay more, but 50% is pretty standard in most industries. Now, of course, they’ll be the exception to the rule like if I do high-end coaching, we did a group coaching at my house here in Southern California. We had like 15 or 20 people here. They all pay like five grand a piece to be here.

Now, obviously, if we’ve had affiliates on that I’m not going to pay them 50. I have hard costs. We had to buy equipment; we had to buy tables, we hired a big Mercedes one of those sprinter vans. They were picked up in location. So there’s no way. But you could give them 15% or 10% or 20 % or something like that.

But when it comes to courses, we have a $1000 course that we sell they get 50%. Because that money you wouldn’t have made without them.

What’s crazy, and here’s something that will just blow most people’s minds, they don’t know this. We looked at our last affiliate promotion we did were an affiliate was promoting us. This other one that they did I think was like 40 or like I said like 80,000 dollars in sales total revenue. Half of them have for us.

When we looked at the buyers, it was like 80 buyers, when we looked at the buyers, and we saw how many people bought. Had they been on our list? We looked, I think like 40 percent of them have been on our list for years and they never bought that. But they bought it through the affiliate.

So when people say like ‘Oh, why would I pay an affiliate commission?’ Because they have a different relationship with that affiliate. And sometimes they trust them on certain things over you.

It’s stupid to think in a stingy way like ‘Oh, I’m not going to. Why do they deserve that kind of…?’ Because they brought you a customer you weren’t going to have.

And not only do you make that one commission but when you sell coaching or something else you’re going to make money off that too.

Marina Barayeva:

What materials do you provide for your affiliates?

Dan Ardebili:

It depends. If they’re a professional affiliate… If they’re not, if they’re just starting out themselves, you might reach people that are on YouTube or whatever and if you find somebody on YouTube that’s never done a webinar or a promotion or something like that, you guys can work out something completely different. So it really depends on that.

For somebody that understands how that works, what you want to present to them is if you have a most recent reply they usually want to see what’s your offer and kind of break it down into a couple of bullet points:

  • What’s your offer?
  • What is it about?

Because a lot of them don’t have time to go through an entire video. The entire video that’s two hours long or an hour long or whatever. Break that down for them.

Also swipes. I don’t want to overwhelm anybody listening for the first time because if it’s your first webinars you’ll kind of create the stuff as you go. So, it’s not like you have to have it all before you start. That’s just too much. It’s like when you start your podcast and saying exactly every single thing you need, and it has to be all perfect. No. It’s just starting it. Get a microphone and start. That’s all you’ve got to do.

It’s kind of the same thing. As you get better, you’ll have all these things together. You’ll have all these, they call, e-mail swipes. Like here’s a suggested e-mail that you should send to get people to register for a webinar or to purchase a product or whatever it might be. And here are four days worth of e-mails. Here’s seven days worth of emails. Usually, it’s like four to seven days.

You just give them an idea. Some people just copy everything you did word for word. But some people like us will rewrite them, but we need those for ideas. You can write some bullet points for them as well. Like here are some ideas how this can work for your customers and so forth. Each one is going to be a little different, but again my biggest advice is just start.

Just start it. Do something.

Marina Barayeva:

If you summarize everything and would put it into a little strategy, we’re going just to start, what are the three steps that our listeners could begin with to sell online courses with the affiliates?

Dan Ardebili:

I would say the first thing is do something. That’s number one.

A part of that number one is: start Googling, looking on YouTube, looking at other courses, other ideas, and other blogs and ClickBank or any other place that you might be able to find one of those affiliates.

I would start with that I would make a commitment to reaching out to maybe one or two. I would recommend at least two a day. Two a day for the next two weeks. Why not? Do more if you want, but a minimum of two.

You can’t do four today and say I’ll skip tomorrow. Do two a day at the very minimum. Now, that will be step 1.

And reach out to them. Like I said, get into that and kind of stalk them in a way. I would also say start thinking outside the box. What are some other… don’t think just plain and simple. Think of like ‘What other people can I partner with that maybe I didn’t think of before?’

Then reaching out to those other people and also doing the networking thing. Those are really the biggest things.

Then once you start doing that, then you can start focusing on the stuff like ‘Oh, signing up for the affiliate platform.’ Because until you have an affiliate, it’s not really necessary. You can still sign up for it. Sign up, buy it, whatever. But until you have that affiliate stop… I call it getting your desk ready. I used to do that.

I don’t know if you ever did that, but I used to have to do sales calls and do stuff, and I was afraid of picking up that phone. I was afraid of picking up the phone and call people. So what did I do, I made my desk perfect. If I just make my desk perfect I’ll feel better; I’ll feel more motivated, I’ll make those good calls.

Oh, if I could just put some motivation pitches up in front of me which I do now I have these. But if I just had these perfect things in place that I would make those calls.

So, stop trying to make it perfect and just do it. That’s step one, two and three honestly. There is no step 2 or 3 other than just doing that part and then every other actionable thing that we talked about in every other thing we gave ideas about. Go back and do those two.

If you have your online course, then the main question is always how to sell it. One of the options is to sell online courses with the affiliates, people who already have the base of followers and established the relationship with them. Get more tips from Dan Ardebili

But after you get a hold of somebody and you start talking to them, and you’re figuring out what they need or who your right audience is that you can partner with. And I’ll tell you what, I did this years back in 2010. From that, I was just talking to somebody and then a guy I was talking to, his name’s Ben Littlefield, now he’s my partner.

In 2010, we became partners after our first call, basically. We’ve done really really great together. You never know. You might find somebody that you’re going to become partners with. Or maybe it’ll just be a short-term joint venture or something like that. So keep that in mind as well. You never know.

Marina Barayeva:

Thank you, Dan. That was fantastic.

Dan Ardebili:

You are welcome.

Marina Barayeva:

Now, tell us how we can find you? How can we connect with you?

Dan Ardebili:

There’re plenty of places you can connect. I’ve got so many things out there, but just go to a rockstarinlife.com. Rockstar in life dot com. You could also go to 2RockStars.com as well. You can find stuff about me there.

Marina Barayeva:

Thank you so much. Thank you for being here.

Dan Ardebili:

You’re totally welcome. And thank you as well for having me.

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