5 Steps to Grow Your Business With an Army of Affiliates (+ Bonus Step)

To grow your business or passion online, you should constantly seek innovative strategies to propel it to new heights. This is at least if you are serious about taking your impact far, and inspiring a culture of hard work, good work, and excellent work within the community.

But this is not easy, you'll face numerous challenges such as constant fear of failure, having no access to the most powerful network in your industry, and sometimes even not knowing how to scout and approach new pools of clients here online. Well, I have good news for you in this article. You don't need to do it alone! You do NOT need to do it alone. We have to stop believing that building a business is taking a lonely road. If you do it all alone, something is wrong. 

One powerful method that has proven to be effective in growing a business as well as a sense of community, is affiliate marketing!

In this article, I will delve into the why and how of growing your business with affiliates online.

But first, what is even affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing involves partnering with individuals or businesses (affiliates) who promote your products or services in exchange for a commission on sales generated through their efforts. This collaborative approach allows you to tap into new audiences and markets without the need for substantial upfront investments of your time and money.

Why is it key?

In the past years, affiliate marketing brought me approximately 65,000 worth of new revenue. It works so well for the following reasons, and this is why you should strategically think about building an army of affiliates too:

• First, it is a win-win, because all you have to do is ask for someone to talk about your products or services, and then, they get a commission for just talking about you. They don't have to do all of the hard work you do in the back to build your services or products. The only work they should do is to introduce you in their circles.
• It also allows you to extend your reach without any investment of your time and money upfront. Affiliate marketing offers a relatively low-risk entry point. The financial risk is minimized since affiliates are only compensated when they successfully drive sales. This performance-based model aligns the interests of the business and its affiliates, fostering a symbiotic relationship.
• For those of you who still struggle a bit with selling, well, this is a good way to let others do part of the work for you. 
• It will help you build a robust business network. A poor business network will hinder growth opportunities, and as Africans who are first generations living in western countries, your business network is usually highly limited. Affiliates act as an extension of your network, leveraging their own connections and platforms to reach potential customers. By cultivating strong relationships with affiliates, you will quickly tap into new markets, and expand your reach.
• Affiliate marketing also allows you to tap into a diverse set of skills for those of you solopreneurs who don't have a team of salespeople. You will benefit from the diverse skills and expertise of your partners. Selling involves many components, and having an army of people who bring diverse skills around selling will skyrocket your business faster than if you only go with your limited skills.
• Affiliates, often operating in different geographical locations or niche markets, provide a valuable bridge. By collaborating with affiliates who are well-established in specific regions or industries, you will effortlessly penetrate new markets, leveraging the local expertise of their partners. So, if expanding your business in a new region is part of your next 2-3 year plan, then, you should start to build relationships now with affiliates

A Structured 5-Step Approach to Grow Your Business with an Army of Affiliates (+ Bonus Step)

Now that you know why affiliate marketing is essential for your business growth, it is essential to know how to go about it. Like all growth strategies, if there's no structure in the way you go about it, you are doomed to fail at it. not everyone knows how to do this. People think that this is only like word of mouth. Finding clients, doing the work well, and then ask your clients for referrals. No, affiliate marketing have nothing to do with client referrals. It is two different things. Your clients are already part of your network, but with affiliate marketing, you are trying to tap into markets that know very little about you, so you should come prepared.

Here is my approach to doing it with success, in 4 steps:

1. Clarify your niche first. If you are not clear about who you are looking for, your affiliates won't also be clear and they will send you unaligned prospects. It's a waste of your time and their time as well. Think about it, affiliates only get a gain from the sales you make. If they keep sending you people but no revenue is made, they'll just stop putting in the effort, and with reason. So, be crystal clear about your niche by doing an audit of your past clients, and extract key characteristics that you hope to see in the referrals they will send your way. This step is also essential for the next step.
2. Prepare your "Avengers" list. When you have clarified your niche, draw your affiliates' lists with your client niche in mind. Think about them as your Avengers Affiliates, who are passionate about your products and have access to an audience that will likely need to buy your products or services. Don't ask for example for someone in the US, to bring you clients from Africa. Got it? Take a moment to think about 10-20 initial affiliates and have them in a spreadsheet that you'll follow. If you struggle to come up with names, think about past clients, past prospects who did not buy from you in the past, acquaintances, business friends you've met at webinars, etc... You should at least know them from somewhere already. 
3. Prepare the materials. Prepare a template message that you will send them by email or DM and you can also have a one-pager that explains your offers and commission split. The goal here is to simplify the task for your affiliates. Your messages should include a short intro about the ask, the audience you are looking for, your offers, and a clear structure of the commission split. If these elements are not clear, people will just straight out ignore your messages. It is not their business, it is yours, so you should make it easy for them to talk about you. 
4. Make the Asks! Once your list is set, and your template messages are ready, get out there, and make the Asks. You should give them a deadline to send you clients and be able to get the commissions. Or, if your platform allows it, invite them to register to your affiliate platform, where they'll be able to refer your products or services at any moment. The thing here is however to make them take action in the short term, and giving some deadlines usually helps with that. This is not easy to do, and many people do it wrong, with not being clear about their asks, or not being assertive enough about the deadlines, or the multiple other errors I sometimes see. As a result, it does not work. If you need to grow rapidly in the next few months, and you'd like to go faster and do it the right way with this, I invite you to apply for my business coaching programs by clicking here. My clients get it right the first time, as they have no time for errors. 
5. Follow-up! The fortune is in the follow-up with affiliates. Because your affiliates are not necessarily your clients, they might not be familiar with your products or services well and they will postpone talking about it, if they don't know much about what to say. Making key follow-ups will allow you to answer any questions they may have and straight out remind them that they are leaving easy money on the table.  
6. BONUS - REWARD REWARD REWARD! This is where your exponential business growth will come from in the future. Not from your sole efforts, but from your community, including your affiliates. So don't be Cheap!! Have extra gifts beyond just the commission dollars for the affiliates who bring you a lot of business (e.g. give them an Ipad worth 1K$, if they bring you +15 000$ with 3+ clients). If you reward well your affiliates, you will be surprised at how much more revenue they'll bring! 

That's it! Growing a business with affiliates presents a compelling opportunity to rapidly overcome your lack of time and money to invest in your sales and marketing activities. It is a collaborative strategy that allows you to not only facilitate growth but also become a brand of reference in your industry! 

That being said, to harness the full potential of affiliate marketing, you must adopt a structured and focused approach. This involves clearly defining goals, selecting the right affiliates, providing them with comprehensive marketing materials, and monitoring performance metrics. Not easy to do at all. It can be hard from the moment to start, to the moment you have that army working for you and bringing you revenue while you sleep. I have coaching programs where we deep dive into this. Apply here if you are ready to step up and grow your business online.