Episode 43: My Failed Affiliate Contest

The Master Sales Funnels Podcast

In This Episode:

• My adventure into an affiliate marketing contest
• The details on how I strategized the contest
• Running ads and retargeting viewers
• Real number results from my marketing effort
• What I learned from failing at the contest
• Why you need to become a data geek
  

Show Notes: mastersalesfunnels.com/043

Resources:

YouTube Ad - This was the video I spent $100 to have created that I ran for the contest.

Landing Page - This was the landing page I used for the contest.

Dream 100 Contest - Enter for your chance to win Dream 100 Software, the Dream 100 Vault, and lifetime access to Master Sales Funnels University.

Episode Transcript:
Hey there, Funnelers. This is Justin Coleman, and this is the Master Sales Funnels podcast, episode 43. For this episode, I wanted to do something a little bit different. I wanted to tell a story of a recent marketing campaign that I tried to do for an affiliate contest. So on August 14th, I started preparing for the group Funnels affiliate contest.

They were launching Group Funnels officially, which they are a funnels building software suite and tools. Actually, if you aren't aware what they are, you can build funnels and websites, send email, host webinars, have courses. That's what I host my courses on. So they had this big launch event and they were finally coming out of beta and I decided that I wanted to compete in their affiliate contest.

So this is going to be the end of their cheaper lifetime deal. I thought it would be a little easier to promote than it was. They had cool prizes like cars, computers. I think they had some iPhone and earbuds and all kinds of cool stuff in there. And I tried on their last contest where I don't know exactly what they were doing because they weren't launching.

But I tried on that one and failed and thought that maybe I could take their what I think is a good product and try and push it because it had a lot of the elements of a good push. There was a time limit and there was a good deal, a good price. If you wanted a funnels builder, it's a one time fee and that beats paying one if you have the upfront cost. So they were going to launch on the 19th. And the week before I had a video made.

It was animated. Explainer video. I used a software called Lovo to make automated voice over because I honestly don't like the sound of my voice. I hope you do because you're listening to this podcast, so hopefully it's not too much like a cat squealing or whatever. I think I sound sick all the time is my problem.

But now you can't unhear that now that I've said that. But anyways, I wrote a script, I had a video made. It cost me $100 to get this. I think it was 30 seconds. Maybe it was 60 seconds video made for this contest and basically just kind of quickly explaining that what the deal was, what the price was, that it was expiring and that, you know, that people should jump on it because it would pay for itself within five months of paying 297 for another Funnels builder.

The video was shortened to the point and I think it showed the value. I'll be sure to link to the video in the show notes so you can check it out. As reference, I'll be linking to my various resources of this campaign that I pulled.

So you can check it out, give me some feedback, start some discussion. For where I was directing people, I created a landing page on SalesFunnelsmentor.com/GrooveLtd. And I'll be sure to link to that as well. That was my landing page where I was explaining the deal that people needed to hurry up and jump on this because they were launching and the price was going up and not only was the price going up, but I think they were removing some of the unlimited access that you could get so naturally I offered bonuses to go along with this.

I gave them access to my vault if they purchased through my affiliate link, I gave them access to the affiliate marketing course I'm working on, Lifetime Access to Master Sales Funnels University, my goal wizard, which is a utility that I created to help you reverse engineer your goals. I also threw in a 30 minutes phone consultation with me to discuss their business and where they were and why they thought Group Funnels maybe would help their business and how I I could help them going forward.

All of this stuff, I put a value on what I think its valued at and also what I'm selling it at and I had a total value of $2,667 if people purchased the Groove Funnels Lifetime Premium deal through my link. And since it only cost 13.97, I thought that was a decent amount of bonus to add on.

I ran the video on YouTube and linked that to the landing page. So when people watch the video and click through, it would go to the landing page on that Salesfunnelmentor.com/GrooveLtd. If you go to just SalesFunnelMentor.com, it's just a very basic landing page leading you to the Lifetime Deal landing page, but people could click through. I targeted marketing and Sales Funnels categories. Originally I had some keywords tagged and I think some specific channels, but that really truncated the results and limited the reach. So I think those would be good things if you want to get very specific and run video ads over certain channels or whatever for a longer term play. But for this I just needed eyeballs that may be interested in this offer of a Lifetime funnels builder.

So I started these ads on the 16th of August to start warming them up before the release of the 19th. I mean, people could still buy at that cheaper price at the time, so they didn't necessarily need to buy during lunch time to get that deal. But I believe they had other bonuses and stuff through Group Funnels if you did wait for the lunch. But I was really just trying to warm it up because sometimes it takes platforms like YouTube and Facebook time to figure out who's going to actually click and then they show more of your ads to relevant people who they know are more likely to click on your ad because they want you to keep spending money because that's how they make money.

So started warming it up on the 16th. Overall, I spent $150.35 running that video ad. It had over 48,000 impressions, 2800 views on the video, which I believe is 3 seconds or more view of the video and 1430 clicks. So not bad there for $150, 1430 eyeballs or at least clicks will discuss what happened with those as we go on here in the story. I didn't want to stop there though. I wanted to.

I didn't want to lose people as they clicked and viewed the page. Maybe they were busy. Maybe they were on their phone on a bus or at work and had to put the phone away really quick. So I experimented with Retargeting on Facebook. I targeted anybody who had visited the Sales Funnels Mentor website, that landing page that I built, but also anybody who had visited Master Sales Funnels within the last 30 days.

I think I targeted just to broaden that market because it wasn't reaching that many people with the Retargeting as it was. So I wanted to broaden that target to people who at least had visited my content and knew of me. I ran the video ad again as the Retarget and I also made some short scroll stopper ads that I created in a program called Opio. They have some pretty good Scroll Stoppers. So I threw some of those in kind of promoting the different days of the launch.

I didn't do it for every day because I got busy with other stuff. I didn't put as much attention into that as I should have. Maybe. But the results from the Retargeting I spent $147.89. I had 5387 impressions, 230 unique clicks and 181 landing page views.

So I got 181 people to view the landing page again, who had already interacted with either the video or the landing page at SalesFunnelsMentor.com or Master Sales Funnels. So warm leads sent back to the landing page.

So combining all of this together, the overall results for this campaign were 1611 clicks from the ads that is both on YouTube and the Retargeting on Facebook. Google Analytics said that I had 772 people visit the Sales Funnels Mentor page. So what that means is 47.9% only stayed on long enough to register with Google Analytics. Out of those 1611 clicks, only 772 people were on that page long enough. So I know I'm getting a bit in the weeds here, but hopefully there's some data junkies out there like me that are finding this interesting and there is a bigger point towards the end if you stick with me, but it's pretty impressive. Like you see, 1600 clicks and you're like, wow, that's a lot of people, but a lot of them don't even see the page. Basically, it doesn't take very long for it to hit that Google Analytics code.

So either it was taking too long to load on their Internet connection or their device or they got distracted or they decided to I don't know.

They saw it real quick and just jumped off really fast before it hit that Google Analytics code before the whole page loaded, basically. So just something to keep in mind. There may be some optimization I could have done there to get people to stay on longer to trigger that. And that might have helped my conversions group Funnels said that I had 125 unique clicks on my landing page. So of the 772 people that landed on SalesFunnelsMentor.com landing page.

And just as an aside, I just use that URL because I had it. I picked it up on a GoDaddy auction for like 12. It's either five or $12. That's usually what I try and pick them up for. That's just the reason why I used that.

There's no other reason behind it. There's no other pages on that site. I just use that for this promotion because it sounded cool anyways. 16.2% click through rate of the people who landed on my page 16.2% click through to the actual Groove Funnels deal. So some may think that's a good click through rate.

It wasn't a ton, I don't feel like, but it should have been enough to get a couple of sales of those 125 clicks. That 16.2% click through rate. I had zero sales on this whole process. So let me put all of this into a little bit of perspective. The previous Groove event that they had that beta launch that I talked about before had an estimated earnings per click of $11.

That means for every one of my clicks, I should have gotten $11. Essentially. I mean, you get $558.08 per sale for your 40% commission rate of the lifetime deal of the 97. Is that 558.80. That means that every 50.8 affiliate link clicks should have gotten me one sale.

If you do that math, there should have been a conversion rate of about 2%. That means I should have had roughly about 2.5 sales from this campaign, which would have been awesome because even if you round down to the two because you can't have half a sale, obviously. So even if you round down two sales should have gotten me $1,117.60. Again. I know getting into the weeds on this, but it's interesting and there's a point to stick with me.

And obviously this over $1100 would have been awesome on my $298.24 investment. Even one sale would have been okay because I would have had that 558 80. I would have gotten my money back and then some almost doubled my money. So zero sales on this whole thing. I spent several days of my free time working on the landing page.

I spent that $100, I guess. You know, it's more than 298. That was just what I spent on ads. I also spent $100 on the video to get that created. And that video is useless to me now because the deal is over.

The price is raised and they're never going back to it. So the video is useless and the ad money is gone. So I guess that's $398, almost $400 I spent on this whole ordeal with zero sales. So what did I learn from all this? That's the important thing that you need to be able to do do in anything, whether you fail, whether you kind of succeed with mediocre results or whether you blew it out of the park and you did awesome.

You need to figure out what you learn from it so you can take that forward. So what I learned was I need to learn to play the longer game. I mean, I know this was a set launch with a set time frame for the contest, but I knew about the launch for a while. I knew it was coming. I could have done other things to build a list provided free resources or share funnels for group funnels.

I could have, I don't know, hit Tiktok more. I could have went in with warm traffic or hot traffic, but instead I went in with cold traffic. That was semi warmed up because I had had some kind of contact with me before, even if it wasn't super related contact. So semi warm leads mostly cold leads going into this deal. Another thing that I learned was I could have burned money faster.

I spent the entire launch time frame spending $300 so I could have burn through that in a day or two, gotten the data and then take the rest of the time to make adjustments. That's a lot of what we have to do is Russell Brunson calls it funnels audibles is just basically making sure you're constantly looking at your data and tweaking your funnels and making it better. So there was time in there where I could have. If I did have more money to spend, I could have burnt through more money earlier to get the data.

I needed to figure out where my leaks were in the funnels to shore that up a bit and you know, figure out how to increase my conversions and I actually get a sale. Another thing I could have done was added better, more relevant bonuses. What my bonuses were where what I had. I used what I had on hand. Some products didn't really relate or have viewable seeable value.

So I had an affiliate course that didn't have a ton to do with group funnels. I related it on the page as to you can build an affiliate upsell within your funnels if you don't have a back end to add to your funnels. If you don't have an upsells, you can make an affiliate offer. It's not super relatable to that. I added the future value of Master Sales Funnels University because the only thing in that right now is the affiliate course.

So I basically just said that I have Master Sales Funnels University. I have a course in it, but I'm going to be adding courses in the future, which I do plan to do. But that's a lot for people to gamble on, especially if they're cold traffic or slightly warm traffic. And they don't know me. They don't know if they can trust me, which I think they can, but they don't know that.

So that was writing a lot on the value of the bonuses. That was like 1447 of the value or something, because that's what I'm selling lifetime access for right now, because that's going to go up in the future. But that's a lot of ask to ask people who don't really know me that well. I should have had some kind of training course, some kind of share funnels to get people started. I could have instead of a 30 minutes random phone call I could have had, you know, I'll get on a Zoom with you and walk you through, setting up your group funnels.

It could have had something more related like that, and that may have driven more value. And lastly, it was a pricey product to start with. So 1397 is cheap in the long term, because like I said in my animated explainer video, it's it will pay for itself in five months if you're paying 297 for another solution. But if you're a small player, you're an affiliate marketer or you're just getting started. That can be a hefty investment.

So I wasn't just it wasn't an affiliate contest to sell Widgets for $20. It was 1397, and that is daunting as an intro offer to people who don't really know you or don't really know of this product that well. So that was another obstacle that I didn't quite overcome in this affiliate contest. So the overall thing that I want you to take out of all of this, I told you we'd get there and this is it. So pay attention or write it down.

You need this level of detail in order to adjust. Funnels don't work on the first try. If you're burning ad money, you need to learn to be able to adjust quickly and get in on all of this data. You need to kind of become a data geek. And like I said, dig in, figure out what your conversion rates are, what you're spending, what your click through rate is, and where your leaks are, so you can, like I said, shore those up, patch them up and ultimately make a sale.

Even if you can't be competitive within the affiliate contest because other people are killing it, you need to at least try to recoup your ad spend and your production costs, like the making of the ad.

Like I had the $100 Explainer video, and also you need to make sure that you're giving yourself the time to prepare for all of this. So a lot of prep time don't start on the contest start date. If you're doing an affiliate contest, make sure that you're starting early enough to make a solid plan, build out solid bonuses and make your offer really good from the get go. And then you can just look at your data, look at your numbers and your conversion rates and see what you can improve from there.

So after listening to all of this, I would like to invite you to go to the show notes at MasterSalesfunnels.com/043

Let me know what you think of my strategy going into this affiliate contest. If you had a better way that I should have approached it, you can also let me know if you like this format of episode, kind of digging into the numbers and giving you an experiment. Details on an experiment that I ran even if it failed. I'd like to know what kind of content you're interested in listening to if you just want what I have been doing, which is just kind of blatant episodes of facts on the different types of lead funnels and kind of teaching you or if you like real world examples like this, also be sure to check out those show notes again MasterSalesfunnels.com/043 to check out the landing page in the animated video before you leave any comments for me, just see, you can kind of see what was going on and maybe get some ideas for your own affiliate contest or your own landing page. Also, I wanted to end with also mentioning again that we have the Dream 100 giveaway going on that ends on September 14. That is free to enter. So be sure to go to that.

I'll link to that in the show notes as well. They've recently updated the software with YouTube, so not only can you find your Dream 100 on Facebook and track their posts and comments and interact with them, you can now see when they're posting and commenting on YouTube. So as Dana Derriks pointed out in the demonstration of the update, not a lot of people comparably are commenting on people's YouTube videos as they would comment on like a Facebook post. So you really have a means of showing up and being very present in the lives of your Dream 100.

If you utilize the YouTube functionality of this software .So, it's a great like I said, it's an awesome software that helps you network your business and get in front of people who already have your audience collected. It comes with the funnels, the Dream 100 vault, which is a lot of awesome training on the Dream 100 and value ladders and setting up your business and just a ton of different value in there. So be sure to hit the show notes and enter that contest before it ends on the 14th.

I hope this episode has provided some guidance on what not to do for affiliate contests and kind of drives home the importance of constant testing, knowing your numbers and having relevant bonuses with all of your offers. Be sure to subscribe to the Master sales Funnels Podcast I would like to continue teaching you and reaching you.

And if you want to share this with somebody who you think would be helpful too, then I would appreciate that. Thank you for listening. And as always, keep funneling.