#256: The Easy Way to Do Affiliate Marketing in 2023

If you’re looking for the easy way to do affiliate marketing in 2023, listen to my new episode of the Blogger Genius Podcast, where I’m interviewing Matt McWilliams, also known as the “affiliate guy.”

Matt has helped large companies and online entrepreneurs create and manage their affiliate programs, and he has great tips for people who want to build a robust affiliate marketing income stream.

During the interview, Matt and I talk about:

• The power of affiliate sales
• How to get into the selling mindset
• Buying triggers for your customers
• The importance of building relationships with other bloggers in your niche
• A visualization exercise for writing sales emails
• His new book called Passion to Profits
• And much more!

Affiliate marketing is a great way to bridge the gap between having nothing to sell and selling nothing at all! Matt shares some great tips in this episode to help you better monetize your blog in 2023!

Show Notes:

• MiloTreeCart
• MiloTreeCart Affiliate Program
• MiloTree Pop-Up App
• Matt McWilliams
• Passion to Profits Book
• Personality Quiz: What Digital Product Should I Create?
• Dana Abraham – Calm the Chaos
• Catch My Party
• Become a Blogger Genius Facebook Group
• All Blogger Genius Podcast Episodes

Subscribe to the Blogger Genius Podcast:

• iTunes
• Stitcher
• YouTube
• Spotify
• Amazon Music

Intro 0:04
Welcome to the Blogger Genius Podcast brought to you by MiloTree. Here’s your host, Jillian Leslie.

Jillian Leslie 0:11
Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the Blogger Genius Podcast. I’m your host, Jillian Leslie. And if you can hear it in my voice, I still have my cold, I’m feeling a lot better. By the way, for those who don’t know me, I am a serial entrepreneur and blogger.

Jillian Leslie 0:27
I’ve been doing this since 2009 when David, my husband and I launched Catch My Party, and we’ve turned it into the largest party idea site on the web. Since then, we built our pop-up app, MiloTree, you’ve seen it on many blogger sites.

Jillian Leslie 0:43
And now we’ve rolled out MiloTreeCart, which is a tool for you non-techie bloggers to sell digital products directly to your audiences with fill-in the blank sales pages. A team of people to help you, tons of resources, the emails and messages I am getting from our MiloTreeCart customers are phenomenal.

Jillian Leslie 1:06
You guys love how easy MiloTreeCart is to use to get your products up and to start selling. So, thank you for all of them.

Now, for any of you who are looking to make money in a new way, we have a MiloTreeCart affiliate program where we pay $100 per sale.

Jillian Leslie 1:27
So, if you have an audience of bloggers who you think could benefit from purchasing MiloTreeCart, remember, we sell it as a lifetime deal $349. I will happily help you promote it. In fact, I just went into a friend’s Facebook group, she teaches bloggers within an hour six people purchased and she made $600.

Jillian Leslie 1:47
Please email me at jillian@milotree.com. If this sounds interesting, my calendar in January is getting filled. So, reach out soon.

Jillian Leslie 1:56
For today’s episode I have Matt McWilliams on the show. He is the affiliate guy; he helps all those big players in the marketing space with their affiliate programs. He also teaches people how to grow their businesses. He has just come out with a book which we talk about.

Jillian Leslie 2:15
We also talk about the power of affiliate sales, how to get yourself into the selling mindset, which you know, I love talking about. And he’s got some tricks and strategies that I think you want to hear. So, without further delay, here is my interview with Matt McWilliams.

Jillian Leslie 2:37
Matt, welcome to the blogger genius podcast.

Matt McWilliams 2:40
Hey, thanks for having me, Jillian.

Jillian Leslie 2:41
You are, I would say one of the top affiliates. What would you call yourself consultants, experts?

Matt McWilliams 2:49
I don’t know. People call me whatever they want to call me. The podcast is the Affiliate Guy. And I’ve become known as that. I wish I could say I was super smart. And years ago, when I branded things with the affiliate guy that I did that because I knew that years later, people will just introduce me like, “Hey, so and so you need to meet Matt. He’s the affiliate guy.”

Matt McWilliams 3:13
I wish I could say oh my gosh, that was so genius of me. Or I don’t want to be the affiliate guy. I really don’t want to be the affiliate guy I want to do something bigger. So, I had a blog. It was all about personal growth and leadership and entrepreneurship.

Matt McWilliams 3:25
And I was teaching all these people this stuff. And then one day, I don’t know if you know, Dayna Abraham.

Jillian Leslie 3:29
I do.

Why Working in Affiliate Marketing Helps People Spread their Message

Matt McWilliams 3:31
So, Dayna, she has a course called Calm the Chaos. I was on the phone with her two weeks before her launch. And I said, “Dayna, do you need help with your affiliates?” Because she just sounded so stressed. She was like, “We’re not doing this. We’re not doing this.” I was like, let me just come in and help.

Matt McWilliams 3:46
And all I did, Jillian. And there’s a lesson here about really tapping into that thing that you’re called to do and the thing that you’re the best at. All I did was help her affiliates. I ran her affiliate program for four weeks. I didn’t even do the normal eight, nine months that we worked ahead of time with other clients.

Matt McWilliams 4:04
I ran her launch, helped her affiliates, I did some strategy calls with the affiliates helped them create some bonus packages. Helped them get past some mindset blocks like I can only send one email in a day. No, you can’t you can send five if you do it the way I teach, and boom, boom, boom, I help these affiliates.

Matt McWilliams 4:22
She went from $125,000 launch to almost a $300,000 launch.

Jillian Leslie 4:26
Wow. Wow.

Matt McWilliams 4:27
Almost on the backs of those affiliates. All I did was this thing that I do, it’s nothing special. Like really affiliate marketing is. Anything that world changing about affiliate marketing? Not really. And then one night Jillian, the parents out there will relate to this.

Matt McWilliams 4:42
We had one of those bedtimes where the kids got along. It was so peaceful. It was efficient, but not rushed. It was a very peaceful bedtime. No, the kids weren’t yelling at each other. Nobody was fighting. Nobody was mad at us for putting them to bed early.

Matt McWilliams 4:57
And we got them to bed and I was walking down the stairs and I went, “Oh my gosh, that was a great bedtime.” There might be hundreds of other people right now having that same experience because I helped Dayna, teach how to calm the chaos. I was like, “Oh my gosh.”

Matt McWilliams 5:14
All I did was help people. We had one affiliate who had a goal of five sales and did over 40 sales a. Another affiliate who had done zero, the last launch, didn’t even want to promote again. We hope to do 17 with their top affiliate more than tripled their sales from like 25 to almost 75 sales.

Matt McWilliams 5:31
And it was like, “Oh, my gosh.” All I did was this thing in the grand scheme of life, I didn’t create a vaccine, I didn’t discover the cure for cancer. I didn’t start SpaceX or Tesla. I just taught some people some things that have worked for me over the years, and the lessons that I’ve learned over 17 years in the affiliate world.

Matt McWilliams 5:50
And the impact that it had, on potentially hundreds of parents. My initial thought was that impacted Dayna, that impacted the entrepreneurs that impacted the affiliates, but it actually had a bigger impact. And so, from that point forward, it was like, no. This thing is going to be called The Affiliate Guy, that’s going to be the brand.

Matt McWilliams 6:08
As a reminder, to me, this is not about the branding, it was a reminder to me, I said all those years, seven, eight years, I don’t want to be the affiliate guy. No, no, I’m going to embrace that and be that.

Jillian Leslie 6:18
I think that is such wise advice. And I say it a lot on my podcast. It’s finding the why. And a lot of times you have to do what you did, which is expand your thinking. And a lot of times what we do, I think is we discredit what we’re already good at. Because we think if I know it, everybody knows it, it’s not that valuable.

Jillian Leslie 6:44
And there you are taking what you know, and being able to share that when you might be thinking like dah, why doesn’t everybody know this, and turn around somebody’s business, so that they can serve other people as well.

Jillian Leslie 6:58
And that is this, I feel the same way in my calling, which is I want to empower predominantly female bloggers and creators to monetize to make money so that they can go live their best lives. And that gets me up every day. So, it’s not about we build technology, we build a way for people to sell what they know. And when I get an email and it says, “Thank you, this is so great.” It makes my day.

Matt McWilliams 7:30
Technology in and of itself is really boring. It’s what technology produces. I have no idea. I call this thing here, you know what you guys call a smartphone, I call it the magic rectangle. The magic rectangle, people don’t realize, this thing is amazing what it can do, you can record 4k video at 60 frames per second.

Matt McWilliams 7:49
That is more than Hollywood could put on the big screen 12 years ago, you have more computing power in the entire United States military had 30 years ago in your pocket. But the stuff that goes into this cadmium, chromium, I don’t even know, I don’t care. It’s boring. It says rectangle.

Matt McWilliams 8:08
Without the things that this thing can do. If I just gave you a rectangle like that in a box, it would be like this is the worst gift ever. Instead, people would stand in line because of what it can do. But you mentioned that we discredit our knowledge, we discredit our expertise, we discredit the impact that we can have.

Matt McWilliams 8:25
One of my favorite stories from my book, and I don’t get to tell the full story because here’s the deal. I finished that manuscript for this book over a year ago. So, I’m going to share with your listeners the end of the story that it’s not in the book, but there is this lady I was talking to she got two autistic children.

Matt McWilliams 8:40
This really ties into that whole idea, like, who am I? Who am I? There are already other people saying the same thing. There are already people teaching what I teach. There are already other people who are helping people with this problem. And this lady, I was on the phone with her, she was applying for our mastermind.

Matt McWilliams 8:59
And the final step is that, I talked to them and interview them and make sure they’re a good fit. And she’s like, “The only problem is, I don’t have any letters behind my name. I want to help parents who have autistic kids, but all these doctors, people from Harvard and Columbia. I dropped out of community college, Matt.”

Matt McWilliams 9:21
I don’t know what made me say this. To this day, I still don’t remember why did I even say these words because it’s crazy and almost a little bit offensive. I said, “Have you ever thought about killing your children?” She goes, “Every day. Every day.” I don’t mean she’s thinking up ways to drown her children.

Jillian Leslie 9:40
I know. I get it.

Matt McWilliams 9:44
We don’t have autistic children there. They just go, “Oh, my life just like huh.” And we all feel that as parents as she said every single day to sit down and talk about that. Talk about it. But you haven’t. You got I think a 14 to 12-year- old and you haven’t.

Matt McWilliams 10:02
So, how have you managed to get through 14 years with one and another 12. I say to her, “And not do that?” I don’t care if you got letters behind your name, I don’t care if you know all the latest science and how the cerebellum connects to the amygdala that doesn’t matter, you raise two children who are functional.

Matt McWilliams 10:26
And she said, “You’re right, actually, as matter of fact, we even travel.” I was like, “Okay, is that a big deal?” I don’t know, I don’t have much history, she’s like, “You have no idea. It’s a huge deal.” So, fast forward. After the book is written, she emails me, she has over 10,000 YouTube subscribers.

Matt McWilliams 10:43
And she had a video that’s got almost 100,000; 200,000 views, something like that, about traveling with autistic children. Here’s what I didn’t know that she told me and this video talks about it. When you have autistic children, it is a nightmare to travel.

Matt McWilliams 11:02
Imagine you’re taking a child who has sensory issues, potentially, and they’re used to routine, and you put them in a flying metal tube, where they’re being told what to do and when to do it. And it’s not their routine, and they’re up there 42 other people and your baggage has to fit in a little thing up there.

Matt McWilliams 11:20
I’m not autistic, or even on the spectrum. And it drives me insane to imagine having those issues. And she said, parents struggle with that. So, I recorded this video, and I just talked about how we’ve traveled peacefully for over a decade, the lady left a comment just blew me away.

Matt McWilliams 11:36
She said to me, “You have no idea how much this video has helped me.” I think she said, I have a seven-year-old. We haven’t left our town in four years. Because of your video. I just booked a flight. And I’m pretty sure she said they were going to Hawaii. She had the confidence to get on the plane with her child.

Matt McWilliams 11:54
And I’m like, this lady doesn’t have letters behind her name doesn’t know all the science, doesn’t know the studies; doesn’t have the certificate on her wall that society says you have to have to be an expert. No, she’s an expert in her experience, we’re all experts in our experiences.

Matt McWilliams 12:09
Your audience is women. There are other women saying that. Are they single women? Are they married women raising kids? Do they have a southern accent? I don’t know, find the thing.

Matt McWilliams 12:23
We talked about step four, step three, the book is all about standing out. How do we stand out? It’s never been easier to get noticed. And it’s never been harder to stand out. So, what is that thing? And for her, it was her experience having autistic children, raising them successfully.

Matt McWilliams 12:40
If I remember correctly, one of them has already gotten a college scholarship. And I think he just turned 16. He’s going to graduate in the Spring, he’s already got a scholarship to a pretty good school. How do you do that? I don’t need a doctor to tell me that stuff. The parents are experts in their own experiences.

Jillian Leslie 12:58
Absolutely. And I call it, you are an expert. And to take the pressure off, you’re an expert with a small ‘e’, you don’t have to have those letters and degrees behind your name. It is really about your experience, but how your experience can help others.

Jillian Leslie 13:17
Nobody cares about me, Jillian and my life, unless you’re my mother or my close family or my close friends. But the truth is, if my experience can make your path lighter, then I have an obligation to put it out there so I can lighten your load.

How to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing

Jillian Leslie 13:39
A lot of people in my audience, I start a blog or start a website or let’s say I’m a content creator, and I want to make money. The first thing people recommend is affiliate marketing. Do you agree with that?

Matt McWilliams 13:56
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Think about it, you have two options, without affiliate marketing. Option one, you create a product. Here’s the problem. When you’re first starting out. You don’t know who your audience really is. You don’t know how are they going to respond. What types of emails are they going to open?

Matt McWilliams 14:17
Are they going to do Payment plans? What price points are they going to do? How long should the cart be open? Should you even close it? Or should it be evergreen? Should you do a launch?

Jillian Leslie 14:27
I don’t even know what problems I’m really solving.

Matt McWilliams 14:30
Exactly. You don’t even know these things. Here’s the deal. That’s option one, you create a product. It’s either going to flop because nobody wants it, or it’s going to flop because you don’t know how to sell it.

Matt McWilliams 14:41
The second option is you just continue to give away free content indefinitely. So content, content, content, content, free content, all that. Here’s the problem with that. I want to make it clear you got a free podcast you should give give give, content content content.

Matt McWilliams 15:00
I’m going to give away more than 340 hours of free content podcasts, blog posts, videos, webinars every day, you can listen almost an hour a day, read almost an hour a day. I’m not saying you have to give away that much. But creating value for free is a great way to attract followers. It’s a great way to serve people.

Matt McWilliams 15:19
But I want you in the money-making mindset from day one, not when you reach some mythical milestone where you should have 1,000 subscribers before you sell anything. Why? When Walmart opens up, they don’t wait until the thousandth customer comes through to sell anything. No other business models. Where did we get that? That’s a lie. That is a myth.

Affiliate Marketing Gives You Things to Sell

Matt McWilliams 15:42
If you run an online business. Businesses make money. And the reason why I love affiliate marketing so much. I know we talked about this beforehand. But the reason I love it so much is it bridges the gap between having nothing to sell and selling nothing at all.

Jillian Leslie 15:57
I love that. Yes. Where do I start? Everybody then says conventional wisdom, Amazon Associates, yay or nay?

Matt McWilliams 16:08
No. Here’s the way I look at it. People say, What’s the best place to start? If we mean literal step one. Here’s one of the best. If you have content coming out tomorrow, go look at that content, say how can I monetize it? I have a blog post coming out tomorrow. Do you cite any books? Well, then yeah, provide affiliate links to those books. It’s an easy way to make a few bucks.

Matt McWilliams 16:33
Generally speaking, if you want to start like truly get started, first of all, there’s an acronym that we walk people through, it’s called START. So, the ‘S’ is to stop waiting, I won’t get into that when it’s basically a lot of people are just hesitant to get into it. It sounds like your listeners are there, they’re there. They’re at a point where they’re like, “Yes, I want to start.”

Matt McWilliams 16:55
The ‘T’ is to think of programs you could promote. Here’s what I do. Look at your desktop, both your physical desktop, and your computer, desktop, or whatever workspace is relevant to your niche. If you’re in gardening, go out to your gardening shed go to your garage.

Look for Products You Use That You Can Promote Effortlessly

Matt McWilliams 17:11
If you’re in health and fitness, go to your home gym, go open up your supplement cabinet. That’s where I start, I look on my desk, I’ve got my planner, we recommend my planner, on my website. I got my headphones; I recommend my headphones.

Matt McWilliams 17:25
I look at my computer desktop, and we recommend certain software’s and certain websites and certain products that we that we use every day in our business, we recommend those things to our audience.

Matt McWilliams 17:38
The ‘A’ so we got the S, the T. The ‘A’ is applied. So, we need to apply to those programs. And we need to get accepted into those programs. The ‘R’, we have to recommend it like we would to a friend, just recommend the product like you would to a friend.

Matt McWilliams 17:54
Years ago, I was speaking at this conference. And I think it was my first ever big conference like, one thousand people there probably was more like 700. But it felt like a thousand to me and I was nervous. I got up on stage.

Matt McWilliams 18:06
And I went through this whole thing about all the benefits of affiliate marketing, why you should start affiliate, you learn what works for your audience, and there’s no risk, there’s no fulfillment, all these things like you connect with other affiliates, how it trains your audience to buy and all those things.

Matt McWilliams 18:19
And I got up there and was like, “Who here thinks that they can do affiliate marketing?” I’m thinking every time I practice the speech, every hand went up and everybody ran up on stage, again, that was what happened in my practice. And only, a third of the hands went up and I was like, “Oh, crap. I’m live on stage.” So, I had to play it off.

Matt McWilliams 18:44
That’s what I meant to happen. I was like, “Okay, I get it. You out there didn’t raise your hand. Why do you not think you can do affiliate marketing?” She’s like, “I don’t think I can sell somebody else’s stuff.” I was like, “Come up here. Do you mind come on up on stage?” She came up on stage sit down.

Matt McWilliams 18:59
I had no idea what I was going to do. Just to be clear, I was making this up as I went. And I was like, “So, if you never sold somebody else’s stuff.” She’s like, “No.” I was like, I’m making this up. What am I going to say next? Oh my gosh, I may never get to speak in front of millions.

Matt McWilliams 19:14
And finally, it kind of hit me and I was like, “Tell me about your favorite restaurant.” She’s like, well, it’s such and such place like what’s it like when you pull up? She talks about the atmosphere when you pull up or when you walk in what’s it like? She’s like, “Oh my gosh, it’s decorated like this. And it looks like this.”

Matt McWilliams 19:30
What about the service? “The service is so amazing. It’s like the waiter is never there but my glass of water is always full. He’s never in the way but we always have everything we need. Oh, the service is so good. Last week when my husband I went we forgot our doggie bag. He almost got hit by a car, bringing it out to us, that’s good service.”

Matt McWilliams 19:47
What about the food now? I know never do this at a conference at 11:30 in the morning. She starts talking about the food at this restaurant and the best way I can describe it is nothing short of a sensual experience, people are out there. It’s like Pavlov’s dogs, they are drooling all over the place.

Matt McWilliams 20:06
She makes this place sound so good. And I go, “Who here wants to eat at this restaurant?” This time, every hand in the place went up, and I looked at her and I said, “You did it.” She’s like, “I did what?” You just did affiliate marketing, you sold 1,000. strangers, people you don’t even know on someone else’s product.

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Jillian Leslie 21:28
One thing that I continue to see in my audience is it’s not even, that they have difficulty selling other people’s products, they have an even harder time selling their own products. So, I feel like selling is really something that holds people back.

Jillian Leslie 21:44
And I’m going to say it especially women, because we’re so good at giving, that it’s hard to say wait a second, if you want this, you need to pay for this. So, how do you think about this selling mindset? Not just selling other people’s products, selling my own products and selling me?

Test Your Affiliate Products to See if Your Audience Buys

Matt McWilliams 22:06
Real quick that ‘T’ though in the START acronym is test test test. And this ties in a little bit with like, test products at different price points. Test a product, that solves the problem in this way in this way and test things maybe a membership versus a onetime fee and things like that, see what works for your audience. That’s part of learning to sell.

Matt McWilliams 22:29
Selling ultimately comes down you got to understand why people buy, when you know why people buy, there are basically five reasons and five reasons only why people buy to save time.

Jillian Leslie 22:38
I go through this, yes.

Matt McWilliams 22:40
To make money or save money, to address fears to feel pleasure and to avoid pain.

Jillian Leslie 22:49
I’m going to add one, raise social status.

Why People Buy

Matt McWilliams 22:53
Yes, and to be honest, that actually ties into one of my favorite quotes from a guy named Risley Goldsborough. I remember I was on a call with him one day, and I tie that under to feel pleasure. So social status, said people buy because the act of buying makes them feel good about themselves.

Matt McWilliams 23:08
He said people don’t buy always to solve a problem. He said, one of the things that they’ve studied when people buy a book, like a business book, how much of the business book they read, and this is if they work at a company, they read just enough that they can talk about that book on Monday morning in the staff meeting, and then go look at me, I got that book.

Matt McWilliams 23:27
That’s why they buy it. They buy it because it makes them feel good about themselves, which ties into that social status. So yes, 4 B would be the social status and so when we understand those reasons, then we have to look at our stuff and we have to go, is it helping people save time, make money, save money, address fears, to feel pleasure, or to avoid pain?

Matt McWilliams 23:51
If we can do that, ultimately the reason why people suck at selling is they sell scared.

Jillian Leslie 23:57
What do you mean by that? Share.

Matt McWilliams 23:59
Scared of looking ridiculous, scared of being rejected, scared of losing subscribers. Here’s a newsflash subscriber count is a vanity number. Buyer’s count is what matters. Scared of someone not liking you, scared of hearing the word no.

Matt McWilliams 24:14
Most feared word in the English language, not snakes, not Donald Trump, not Joe Biden. Not tax increase, no whatever. It’s no. We hate hearing the word no.

Matt McWilliams 24:27
When you sell scared people know it instinctively. A dog can sense fear. I think we’ve learned that. Dogs can sense fear. Perspective customers know when you’re selling scared. It comes the way you look at people, Jillian, it comes across in your posture can be controversial. Here’s the thing that I want to touch on. It even comes across in your emails.

Sale Email Visualization Exercise

Matt McWilliams 24:48
And there’s an exercise that I walk people through in the book. I’ll walk you through kind of the brief version here. I’m telling you, I’m very afraid of the word no, I’m a recovering people pleaser as Michael Hyatt would say.

Jillian Leslie 25:08
Matt, who isn’t.

Matt McWilliams 25:10
And this helped me so much. This exercise that I walk you through step-by-step in the book, but I’ll give you the overview here. Basically, before I write copy, or before I record a podcast, or before I make a big ask before I start sending text, saying, “Hey, can you do something for me?”

Matt McWilliams 25:28
I walked through this visualization exercise, it’s gotten to the point where now it takes me about three minutes, it used to take me 10. But I literally sit down and I get into a comfortable place, I turn the lights off, it’s a meditation type exercise, visualization exercise, and I take a moment to visualize my avatar. And I visualized her opening an email.

Matt McWilliams 25:51
Now, if this email is intended to inspire them, I see her inspired. If it’s intended to maybe make her laugh, I think I’m going to use some humor in this one, I want to see her laughing. If I want her to click on the link, and by that I’m going to visualize that whole process, what emotions am I conjuring up?

Matt McWilliams 26:09
Sometimes it’s humor, sometimes it’s a little bit of anger, you know what curse the establishment, I need to be angry at this. So, I want to see that in there as they’re reading. And I visualized them, I see them clicking the link, what’s my call to action, click the link, if it’s hit reply, I see them hitting reply.

Matt McWilliams 26:28
And I see them looking at the sales page, affiliate product, my own product, whatever it is, I see them taking the action that I want them to take, I see them reading the sales copy, I see them watching the testimonial videos and going, “Yep, okay, I feel like this is for me.”

Matt McWilliams 26:43
I see them then choosing to enroll, they click the button, they type, I see them pull out their wallet, pull out their card, enter the card information, click on buy. And then this is important. I see them being satisfied with their purchase. But then this is the big thing at the end, I fast forward two years.

Matt McWilliams 27:01
So, if you sell a weight loss product, see them being happy two years from now being thin and active and playing with their kids or grandkids and walking up the flight of stairs. If you’re selling a quit smoking product, see them not smoking and doing those same things.

Matt McWilliams 27:17
If you sell a business improvement product, see them with a couple of team members enjoying the fruits of their labor and being successful. If you sell real estate, see them living in their new home, whatever it is, picture this as vividly as you can. When you then open your eyes and sit down to write what fear do you have of selling? There is none.

Jillian Leslie 27:36
What is interesting about what you’re saying, I have two thoughts. One, it gets you out of you, you’re totally about that customer. And two, you are all about the transformation for that person. It’s not that that person buys your course or your book, it’s then you are helping them make their lives better.

Matt McWilliams 28:07
Zig Ziglar.

Jillian Leslie 28:09
I was just going to say those are the two things I’m hearing and I am always talking about get out of yourself. This isn’t about you. But that is such a powerful way. In fact, I have to write some emails today. And I’m going to use that exercise to further help me get out of myself and my own insecurities.

Jillian Leslie 28:29
Oh no, what if you say no, what if you unsubscribe from the list? What if you think who knows what about me? And you just go, “Nope, not about me. Again, my mission is I see a better future for you.

Matt McWilliams 28:47
Zig Ziglar, my favorite quote on selling ever he said, “Selling is essentially a transfer of feelings.”

So, in other words, if you’re going to sell effectively, you got to have passion, you got to have belief in the product you’re selling.

Matt McWilliams 28:59
If you find it hard to sell, because you’re like, “I don’t even know if this is going to work.” It’s the wrong product. It’s the wrong affiliate product, you created the wrong product, or you have the wrong audience.

Matt McWilliams 29:08
There are times where I’ll go through that exercise. And then I’ll go to my team and go, “Guys, I don’t think this needs to go to everyone. The person I’m seeing opening this email and clicking on the link and reading it and buying it is only people on our list who are in this category.” So, we segment our list.

Matt McWilliams 29:26
It might be these 12,000 people, or whatever these 8,000 these 20,000. It doesn’t matter but it’s only people who have done this and shown that they’re in this category. Those are the people I see who are going to react to this. And part of what’s holding me back is we’re trying to send this to 30,000 people when 10,000 of them are irrelevant.

Matt McWilliams 29:48
And so I go, “You know what, let’s just pull back from those people. Let’s only send it to the people it’s best for.” And now I’m great. I’m confident again. We try to sell something that maybe hasn’t gotten results for us. If I have like, “I would like to recommend that book. What was your best takeaway?” “I don’t know.”

Matt McWilliams 30:05
Why would you recommend it? You have to think about that.

Jillian Leslie 30:09
I feel like we are the sensory beings and we pick up stuff from people. Like, are you authentic? I say this, I’m an Enneagram 6, if you know anything about the Enneagram.

Matt McWilliams 30:21
What is that?

Jillian Leslie 30:23
It’s the fear based one. But I’m very, very, very loyal. I’m always looking for are you being honest? Because I’m very honest, and are you trustworthy? Because I am very trustworthy, and I need to feel safe. And so, that is the prism through which I see the world.

Jillian Leslie 30:46
And what you are saying is we do I pick up on stuff, and therefore I pick up on who I want to work with, who I don’t want to work with all of that, whose books I want to buy. And in emails I’m always sniffing for this sense of authenticity.

Jillian Leslie 31:04
And what you are saying is, be mindful of putting it in first. Being really intentional about saying, no, no, you can trust me, and I am really trustworthy.

Matt McWilliams 31:18
It’s everything.

Jillian Leslie 31:19
It is everything.

Matt McWilliams 31:21
I’ll tell you right now, my wife has a filter, when we go any item over a few $100. If the salesperson gives her a bad handshake, we’re done. It’s part of her spidey sense.

Matt McWilliams 31:35
And here’s the deal I’ve known people who gave a bad handshake who turned out to be great, but for her. This is the woman who has talked me out of some of the worst decisions in my career, and in my business, and she didn’t even know why she was saying no. And then six months later, I was like, “Oh, that turned out to be a good decision.”

Matt McWilliams 31:58
So, she’s batting 1,000. She is like, 20 for 20, on things like that. So, when she says, five seconds into meeting the salesperson, we’re done then we’re done. And so, if that’s how people feel that you’re never getting it back. And so, you’ve got to put them at ease, as soon as possible.

We’re Afraid of Selling Because We’re Scared of People Saying No

Matt McWilliams 32:19
And again, like you said, we’re only scared of selling because we’re scared of what’s going to happen to us, of our feelings, not of the potential. You owe it to the people, I don’t care how many people, you owe it because somebody needs the thing you’re going to be selling.

Matt McWilliams 32:36
At the very beginning of the book, I talked about how you’re a messenger, the world needs your message, but they’re going to move on without you. They’re going to get the solution from somebody, right now I’ve got really bad ankle pain.

Matt McWilliams 32:52
I think I sprained my ankle, but I’m not 100% sure, as soon as we get off this, and then I finished my next call, I’m going to try to find a solution. If it’s not for my doctor, if my doctor can’t see me, then I’m going to go someplace else to find out what is wrong with my ankle. I’m not just going to yope guess my ankle is just going to hurt for two weeks.

Matt McWilliams 33:11
Whatever it is, oh, I guess I just never going to start a business. Guess I’m just never going to be able to do whatever. What is the thing that your audience they’re in pain. They’re suffering. They’re going to find the solution.

Jillian Leslie 33:24
And I’ll say this, if I could honestly, if this is the real deal. And I can fix your ankle pain. How much money would you give me literally if there was 100%?

Matt McWilliams 33:38
I would grab $2,000 right now with a blink of an eye it hurts.

Jillian Leslie 33:43
Exactly. So, if you trusted me, I don’t have any magic and gold solution, but if I did, and I stood behind that, and I could solve your problem, you would spend a lot of money to solve it.

Matt McWilliams 33:56
Oh, yes. And the point is you’re not serving your audience to be afraid to sell but they might say no. Again, they’re not saying yes to you not asking them. Like how much are you selling, not selling? If you thinking about that, that’s a question I asked a lot of people is how much are you selling, not selling? “Nothing.” So, try selling.

Matt McWilliams 34:21
Try it poorly at first. Grab the book, okay, why don’t I do. There’s a whole lesson in there on copywriting, my entire thesis on copywriting. Do step one, because that’s the most important one about really nailing down your ideal customer avatar.

Matt McWilliams 34:40
And then step two about committing to leading and then of course, if you need help growing your list, we talked about capturing attention and growing your list. Some great stuff in there.

Matt McWilliams 34:46
Let’s skip to the part where I talk about selling and copywriting and I walked through that visualization exercise because if you know how to write copy, and you know how to get past your fear of selling, there’s a lot in there but just the mindset of selling.

Matt McWilliams 34:59
And then you how to do the visualization exercise, I can promise you, if you sit down and write something and send it out, you will make money. How much money? I don’t know. Definitely 100% this is the guarantee you can take to the bank, it’s more than if you didn’t send the email at all.

Jillian Leslie 35:16
Absolutely.

Matt McWilliams 35:17
It’s so obvious, but it’s true. Because a lot of times we just go, “I’m not going to do anything.” Nothing sucks. Nothing is a terrible option, do something.

Jillian Leslie 35:24
I love that. Matt, tell us the title of your book where people can get it and where people can learn more about you.

Matt McWilliams 35:34
So, I have to pull it up here. There’s a special URL we created for you. Jillian, as I thought it’s passionsintoprofitsbook.com/jillian. So, you could put that in the show notes, Turn Your Passions Into Profits. The whole book I said earlier, kind of the treatise of the book.

Matt McWilliams 35:51
The whole premise of the book hinges on one belief that the world needs your message. The world needs your message, there are potentially hundreds, thousands, millions of people out there right now desperately waiting for you to share your message with them.

Matt McWilliams 36:07
And so, this book, as I mentioned earlier, walks you through again, how do we get clear on who we serve? There are some exercises in there for that. How do we commit to leading and become a leader for our audience, our potential audience.

Matt McWilliams 36:19
How do we capture attention? Not just like hope that we get some attention. How do we go out and grab it. How do we get noticed? How do we convert people into subscribers, build a community, become a hero, a champion for our tribe? How do we condition our audience to actually click and buy and create raving fans?

Matt McWilliams 36:40
And then ultimately, the last two chapters are all about monetizing. Affiliate Marketing is my jam so no shock. The longest chapter is about affiliate marketing, but how do we actually do that in a way that works? How do we sell? How do we get accepted into affiliate programs? How do we do copywriting?

Matt McWilliams 36:58
And then the final chapter is about creating consistent content. So again, passionsintoprofitsbook.com/jillian. You can buy it on Amazon, you can buy it at Target, Walmart, if they sell books, they sell my book. But if you go through that URL, we’ve got some special bonuses for your listeners Jillian that people want to take advantage of.

Jillian Leslie 37:16
Wonderful. I just have to say, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. I feel like we were very much like-minded in how we think about a lot of things. So, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Matt McWilliams 37:27
Thanks for having me, Jillian.

Jillian Leslie 37:28
I hope you guys liked this episode with Matt, my biggest takeaway was the quote that he was sharing, “Selling is essentially a transference of feelings,” said Zig Ziglar, who was a famous motivational speaker. This really simplifies what it’s all about.

Jillian Leslie 37:46
If I can make you feel differently, and hopefully better I can sell to you. Selling is also a muscle that I recommend you start working on because I think it’s going to be even more important for all of us in 2023. In fact, if you want to be selling and promoting MiloTreeCart, join our affiliate program you can get there at milotreecart.com/affiliate.

Jillian Leslie 38:11
And I would love to help you promote it any way that I can. Just reach out to me at jillian@milotree.com. The beginning of the year is always a great time because people dig in and work on their businesses.

Jillian Leslie 38:26
And I will see you here again next week. Hopefully with my voice all back to normal, stay healthy out there.

Other related Blogger Genius Podcast episodes you’ll enjoy:

• How to Make Easy Affiliate Money Now with Jeannine Crooks
• How to Up Your Affiliate Sales Right Now with Jeannine Crooks
• How to Start Selling on Amazon Live with Nicole Carr

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