Welcome to this week's podcast. And today I'm really, really excited because I've got two of our masterclass speakers that are going to be joining us at Elevate this year coming in to talk a little bit about their masterclasses and also to give you a little sneak peek as to what you could be missing out on if you don't book your ticket to Elevate on the 14th and 15th of June. So before we get started, a couple of questions that I've been asked is why a virtual summit and why are panels and masterclasses, which I hear people asking me all the time. And I thought before I answer that question, I'll just bring the experts to you to answer those questions. And before we get started, I'll get them introduced. So on my right is Susan Kabani. Hi. Hi. Thank you so much, Leanne, for having me. Looking forward to having you start your masterclass. And on my left is Patty McGill.
SPEAKER_00Hey Leanne, thanks so much for having me.
SPEAKER_03Awesome. Right. Now now we've got you introduced with your names and what you're going to be talking about in a little while. I want you to start your backstory for our listeners of how we all got connected and why you're going to be speaking at Elevate this year. So maybe Susan, if I could start with you ladies first.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, sounds good. Uh yes, guys. Um Leanne and I met because so Eugenie is a membership and community platform for professional organizations. And I was working with a really big women's network here in the UK in the southwest of England. And Leanne was also a member of that community, actually. So you, you know, it was a Eugenie customer. Leanne has had a, you know, we decided to connect. I think I did a masterclass for them as well, or I did some sort of why community was important for them. And we connected afterwards because of the great work you do with affiliate marketing. I mean, community can be that's another way of saying it, to be honest, right? It's a nice way of saying have people who love you recommend you. I mean, that's you know, and I'll be talking about that later. But that's how we met. Thanks, Susan. And what about you and Patty?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so uh Liam, we met, if I remember rightly, we met on the guild platform um for the uh the partnerships lounge for the guys over at Performance In. And we connected obviously on LinkedIn. We had an amazing chat. We had we were meant to have like a 20-minute chat, and it ended up being like an hour and a half. We got to know each other. It was almost like a first date. Like we got to know each other, like everything we've done together, uh all the all the work we've done. And it we just hit it off really well. And the Anne was so gracious and kind to offer me a spot to come and talk. And I'm really excited about talking, you know, how you can find new uh affiliates and partners and how to reach out to pla in places that you wouldn't normally expect.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, the reason why I wanted you guys to just tell our community how we met is because that's the one thing that's really different about some of the events that we pulled together is that I have curated this content with experts who I know and trust and who I know are doing really cool things so that we can bring you in to actually start sharing that with our community and help share the best practices that you guys are gonna be talking about. So, Susan, I want you to get into a little bit about what is Eugenie, how does it work, and then also just talk a little bit about the masterclass that you're gonna be giving at Elevate and what our delegates are actually gonna learn from you at this event.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, sure. So Eugenie's I'm one of the co-founders, I think Leanne mentioned of Eugenie. And um, I started this with my husband actually to give you communities a more private curated way to connect with one another that wasn't relying on social media. So our vision was, you know, either you had the option to use a social media platform like Facebook or LinkedIn or WhatsApp to bring your community together, which it did, you know, it fits certain objectives. And it, I think maybe five, six years ago worked a lot better than it does today. Or you could go and invest and build in your own tech, which a lot of small communities and memberships don't have, you know, funding, resources, technical knowledge, essentially. So we essentially started, decided to, we wanted to build something that was like a private version of Facebook. It's grown quite a lot since then. And, you know, it also was about democratizing the access to technology. Although we can't make it free, Eugenie isn't a free platform. We're trying to make it really accessible so that those brands that do want something that's curated, customized, and really relevant for their communities, they can afford that. I think there's a huge privacy and data thing as well. You know, if we talk about affiliate marketing and not owning your own data and not really owning those relationships, it can also not be great for your business if you don't have any control of the content that you're sharing. So, Eugenie, you know, it's I guess the best way to describe it is having your own LinkedIn plus plugging in a powerful membership backend. We're working with a lot of brands today that you might think membership organizations, associations, trade bodies, but the surprise kind of winners that we're working with are what I'm going to be talking about in the masterclass is which is why big brands who are not memberships, who are not associations, who are not charging anything to the end user are using the community model for bringing, you know, ROI into their business, trying to keep customer engagement and retention for the long run. Why are big brands like Sephora investing millions of pounds and building community platforms that they own and run? And what kind of investment you can get if you do put in the building blocks, build it right. And, you know, it's not as easy as setting up a Facebook group. I think a lot of people learn that the hard way. But there's so much power, right, in bringing your community together, even if it's a really small community. I mean, some of our communities are 10,000 people, others are 25, and they're brilliant, right? They're they're really highly engaged, people love it. But I think bottom line, if you can build a community, if you can put in customer there, your customer base, and you turn them into a community, you're building the strongest ambassadors for your brand. And, you know, any business can afford that. If you put the grit in, the time and build those relationships, it's not about having huge marketing budgets if you use this model to really do your customer engagement work. So we're working with quite a lot of brands actually that are just really changing their whole customer service engagement model on its head and turning these customers into a customer community.
SPEAKER_03So where you're saying customer, we talk affiliate because the affiliate is the customer in this respect. But also, I think the most important point that you've touched on here, which is why we've invited you to elevate, is it isn't expensive to set up a community and it isn't expensive to retain your partners and offer them something extra that nobody else is offering right now in terms of the management of their affiliate program database because we talk about engaging our customers and we've and we sometimes forget about engaging our affiliates and our publishers as well. So I'm really excited to be in this masterclass because we are very big on building community here at Affiliate Insider. We're building community with all the people that are coming to our events and we want to be able to help expand and take these concepts that you're talking about and actually apply them into affiliate programs. Now, Patty, I know you've come from a sort of community background too, because in your past, before you know joining eWebinar, you were at ThinkIffic. So I know you're highly aligned with what Susan's saying, but in your experience, how have communities around affiliate programs really influenced growth in some of the programs that you've managed in the past?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I can give you a really great example. So in my time as a consultant, predominantly my clients are SaaS businesses. I worked with a live streaming platform that was focused on like the gaming industry, the gaming niche. So think of you know people playing like you know, Call of Duty and FIFA and stuff like that. So lots of people online, lots of people that are, you know, that are used to being in places like Discord and when Susan mentioned like Facebook and places like that. So I had a really great tactic and strategy to get more exposure to the brand that I worked with restreamed. So I approached all of the managers and the admins of all these communities on places like Facebook and Discord and said, hey, uh, in exchange for a very small monthly fee, and because a lot of these community managers they don't really know how to monetize their communities as well, you can approach them and say, hey, I'm gonna give you like what looks like a big amount of money for them. It's actually not like you know $50, $100 a month, and commissions ongoing. If you put a pin post at the top of your group, or in some instances, I had people put a question in the sign-up field say, Have you actually gone and signed up for a free restream account? Here's the link. And then once the hit once they hit yes, then we can obviously like double check that. But we were getting like hundreds of thousands of impressions for like less than five, six hundred dollars a month just from people coming into these groups. And because it's gamers, you know, a lot of people are online, it's a pretty I hate to say it's a pretty easy niche to go after when it comes to communities and worked out super well because we're just getting again all of these impressions. People sign up for free, they're in the the core SCP of our user and worked out great. But yeah, I I can't sing highly enough about community building and communities, it's the way forward. And you know, we've done very similar things uh over ThinkKivic as well, uh, which I can talk about later.
SPEAKER_03Awesome. So while I have you here, then what I want you to do is talk a little bit about your masterclass because there's some pretty brilliant nuggets that people are gonna get out of your masterclass too.
SPEAKER_00Thanks, Deanne. So uh my masterclass is all about how to build a recruitment funnel that you can automate uh and take out a lot of the hard manual work of looking up emails and finding new partners. And I'm gonna show you in like just a literally a couple of minutes how to look at all of your competitors, how to get a list of every single one of their affiliates, and then how to put them into an outreach sequence that gets like a 50 to 60 percent open rate and a six percent reply rate on all the emails. And that's what I've been doing with uh the guys over at eWebinar. You know, webinar tools are a pretty competitive industry. So for me, I just look at all our competitors, all the tools that are complementary. So people that use webinars are they using like community platforms, are they using course platforms? I look at all of those tools, find out the ones that have got affiliate programs and keep downloading lists every week of all their affiliates and put them into an outreach sequence. It's automated, but the cool thing is is that the personalization is really, really high because it can pull in dynamically people's like references from people's blogs and Twitter accounts. So you don't actually even need to write, hey, I just read your blog. You can just actually insert the quote without even having to read it. And it looks like you've spent the time doing the outreach. So it's a pretty cool strategy. And I'm gonna talk about some of the campaigns I built with my time over at Finkiffig. I took that affiliate program basically to number one for education over on uh ShareSale. And I think we were like 21 on the power rank overall, and it's just like me, basically it's just me. So like, yeah, looking forward to sharing some secrets there.
SPEAKER_03So I gotta tell you guys, I mean, if there's affiliate managers out there listening to this podcast this week, if you want to save time and you want to learn how to automate your outreach, which is probably one of the biggest pain points that affiliate managers have, is finding new affiliates, you know, doing that outreach, doing that sales pitch. We've got a masterclass for you that's gonna actually show and tell you exactly how to do this. And secondly, if you're looking to actually add something extra to your affiliate program, if you're looking to actually build community and make sure that the content that you're sharing is actually seen and heard and interacted with, because often, and and I did want to say this when you were speaking, Susan, the thing about Facebook is that yes, anybody can open up a Facebook group, but Facebook doesn't actually post all of your content when you post it to all of the people that are in your group. So whilst you're doing all this work to try and get people into your Facebook group, a third, maybe even less, are seeing the content that you're posting in that group. So curating community around your affiliate program is incredibly important if you want to keep loyalty. So we're gonna teach you how to find them, we're gonna teach you how to keep them, and we're gonna teach you how to engage them across the course of these two masterclasses. Unfortunately, Melinda isn't joining us today, but there's a whole other tactical masterclass that's gonna be coming to this event as well in terms of how to gamify, how to actually get your affiliates to be earning more as well. So I really just wanted to get you guys on the pod just for a quick session this week, just to talk about the really key things that we're gonna be sharing and elevate and why it's so important that people should be buying their tickets to get to these masterclasses. Now, before I let you go, one of the things that I wanted to ask you both is can you give us just like two key takeaways or two little nuggets that you want to share before people actually attend this masterclass on how you're gonna either save them time or money?
SPEAKER_00If you've been trying to figure out how to automate your recruitment process, I'm gonna show you how to do that within 15 to 20 minutes and it's gonna save you hours and hours of time per week. If you run an agency, for example, you're gonna save a lot of money as well from all the time from your account managers that are gonna be doing outreach. And also just some of the campaigns that I'm gonna be talking about on my talk could make you guys some serious money. So I highly encourage you to come check it out. I'm very big on sharing. I'm a big believer in like being as open and as transparent as possible. So you can come and ask me any question. And I sort of don't think like the old school where like everything has to be a secret and you keep it to yourself. I'm a big believer in like sharing your absolute best information for free because then if people want to work with you eventually, then they will come talk to you. So yeah, you're gonna get absolutely everything I know about affiliate recruitments. So please come and join it.
SPEAKER_03And I know that that last statement actually resonates with you, Susan, because you're a big believer of sharing a lot of content. I've seen it. The content and the insights and the strategies that you share with the people that are using your platform, but also, you know, people that are in your community's platforms. I've seen you share like really in-depth content. So hopefully, you know, people are gonna enjoy that and people are gonna learn, you know, one or two really key things from you as well as takeaways.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I mean, look, I think, you know, it's it makes sense for Patty to go first because he's gonna help you find them. He's gonna help you bring those, you know, community members in. I think I'll be sharing some really practical tips of how to get that engagement that you're looking for. But also, you know, the first question I'll always ask is defining engagement for your particular affiliate network or community. What does that actually mean for your business? Thinking about the time you put in, how is that gonna translate in a monetary way and how to track that? And I think sometimes we forget about that. We need to make sure that we set those goals on day one. And we don't necessarily need to compare ourselves to Facebook. You're not gonna be able to achieve what you can on Facebook in in a in a platform of your own or wherever you decide to host it. So, you know, we'll talk about how to choose a space as well in terms of what might be right for your business or your particular community. It may, you know, it may not be a private platform like Eugenie, it might be a Slack or Discord or WhatsApp. So we'll talk about some of the pros and cons and how to make that choice for you know which technology, because it's there's a lot out there, right? So it's can be very difficult even just choosing the right space, which will then set yourself up for what we're looking for, which is retention and eyeballs on your content. But I think my biggest takeaway will also always be it's not about numbers, it's about quality and it's about retention. So, you know, you could have a hundred affiliates. If all a hundred of them are looking at your content, it's better than having 10,000 where 1% is seeing it and engaging and coming back. So, you know, defining engagement, what that means, choosing the right platform and some high top-level tips of how other communities within our Gini world are maintaining and keeping their members engaged.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I love it. All right, guys, that's it for this week. I am thrilled that you could join me on this impromptu podcast to just share a little bit more about the masterclasses that we're gonna be giving in Elevate. I, for one, cannot wait to attend these masterclasses and learn some of the skills that you guys are gonna be sharing. And I can't wait to get there and share this out to our community with you guys. Thanks so much, Leanne.
SPEAKER_00I'm very excited. Thank you, Leanne. Thanks, Susan.
SPEAKER_02And that's a wrap for this week's Affiliate Insider Affiliate Marketing Podcast. If you're loving what we're putting down in this series, head on over to Apple iTunes and give us a five-star rating, and subscribe to our podcast channel so you never miss another insightful episode. Tune in next week for more digital marketing insights and traffic driving tips, tricks and strategies to keep your digital marketing fresh and your affiliate program driving consistent sales. Making a high-quality podcast like this takes a lot of work. That's a fact. But not when you hire copers. With our White Live experience, we handle everything for you. From guest outreach all the way through to publishing and promotion. We handle it all. You show up to hold great interviews and build relationships with your guests, and we take care of everything else. Podcasting is not just about the audience. Every podcast interview is the start of a new relationship. With a weekly podcast, you would build relationships with 52 ideal partners or prospects through your podcast interviews over the next 12 months. Do you believe that 52 new relationships would grow your business? We do. Contact Jason at coachkov.com and let's talk.