Matt McWilliams: And then my number one recruiting trick that almost nobody uses Oh my gosh, this is so easy. And literally almost no one uses it. Once you have some affiliates, ask your affiliates. I know you're thinking like, thank you, captain obvious.
But if almost no one is doing it, don't you think it's worth mentioning? I've been a part of more than 250 affiliate programs, maybe five. Seven, something like that have ever asked me to refer other affiliates. Once you get started, your number one source, and you do this with your first affiliate, you have one affiliate, you ask him because if they were for one, you've doubled the size of your affiliate program.
Once you have a couple of, or even one affiliate, your number one source of new affiliates should be current affiliates is the easiest way to grow. And the key here is to ask them and make sure they get a second tier commission. So typically if I refer an affiliate. And let's say they sell 1, 000 worth of stuff.
Maybe they get the 30 percent commission 40, but it doesn't matter, but let's just say they get 30%. So they get 300. I get a hundred for the referral and I'm going to give you an email. You guys can feel free to screenshot this very simple email. Notice it's three sentences. What is if people sometimes go it's only three sentences.
I'm like what is it missing? It's missing nothing. It's missing. Absolutely nothing. It's a very simple email that gets right to the point. Hey, do you know anybody who'd be a good fit for our program? If so, send them over. That's it. Feel free to screenshot that email and use it. Once you start having affiliates, I'm gonna repeat what I just said.
Your current affiliates. It should be your number one source of new quality affiliates. So line number two here that you have to know all the right people and maybe be one of the cool kids to run an affiliate program. It's simply busted line number three. I think this will be the last one we get to cover, but it's important one.
Most of your sales will come from only a few affiliates. One of the top names in internet marketing years ago at a conference on stage, I remember exactly what he said. 90 percent of your sales will come from your top three to five affiliates. I remember like me and my team looked at each other that's not true.
He said 90 percent of your sales will come from your top three to five affiliates. This person a few years later contacted us and said, will you coach our team on how to build affiliate programs like you do? The following year they had their best launch ever and less than 50 percent of their sales came from their top three, top five affiliates.
Their top 10 affiliates only accounted for 60 percent of their sales that year. Previously their top 10 affiliates had accounted for 97, 98 percent of their sales. So here's the data on this. First couple of sub lives. Number one, you have to personally know all of your affiliates. In other words, you got to be best buds.
And secondly, small affiliates are not worth the hassle. Let me tell you this small affiliates are worth the quote unquote hassle because when somebody's small, they are loyal. And if you help a small affiliate become a big affiliate, or you help a small affiliate just. You treat them like you would a big affiliate.
They will remember that. And over the course of the next few years, they will grow. If you have a hundred small affiliates today, who maybe are making one sale a year, and it's that's not even worth the time. Fast forward two, three years, 10 of those affiliates will be 10 times bigger or more. A few of them might even be a hundred times bigger and they will never forget.
That you gave them a chance. I still have affiliates that I work with 18 years later that work with me because they were nobody's back in 2005 and I gave them a chance. And when you do this is what happens. Michael Hyatt, one of our clients back in the day, huge seven figure launched some of the biggest names in the internet marketing world.
Let me just take a look at this leaderboard here. You've probably heard of a few of these people, right? This is a who's who of names in the internet marketing world. And yet their top three only accounted for 14 percent of sales, only 27 percent of sales. Came from the top 10 and they had more than 500 affiliates make at least one sale.
That is an army. That is an army of affiliates. Claire Diaz Ortiz. We ran her summit a few years ago. One of the very first virtual summits that we'd ever run at, to that point, most virtual summits maybe had one, 2000 registrations. This one had 12, 000 registrations and yet. Not a single affiliate accounted for more than 400 registrations.
She had more than 110, 110 affiliates in leads to that. To that summit. That's diversification. Ray Edwards, nearly the same numbers as Michael had a leaderboard that looked like this. Again, it's a who's who of names and you probably recognize a lot of those names, don't you? And yet 19 percent of sales came from the top three.
He had more than 30 or only 34 percent of sales from his top 10 and more than 16 affiliates doubled their sales year over year, doubled their sales. How do we do this? Like, how do, how does this work? We ignore the conventional wisdom that we'll talk about in here in just a second before I finish up.
Jason, Cecilia, Hokey, just one more example here, 114, 000 attendees year before with no affiliates, they had less than 20, 000, no affiliate sent more than 2000 leads. And most of their affiliates were first timers completely defies the conventional wisdom that says finding affiliates is hard. That is not worth it.
It tells you not to work with those small affiliates. You have to do a ton of reciprocal promotions. You have to intimately know all of your affiliates. These are simply not true. So when you ignore these lies, and especially number three, that most of your sales will come from only a few affiliates, then you can build an affiliate program that grows fast and that lasts.
So lie three, So we finish up here. We can safely say this one is busted.