How I made $200K in an hour - the inside story of an affiliate launch!
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Do you ever hear people on the internet say things like this?
“I just totally smashed my course launch and made $200 G’s in an hour.”
Now you’re thinkin’ …It’s probably some internet get-rich-quick scam…
But no… they keep at it “Bro, no seriously. My course smacks. The people of the internet love courses. It’s like the drugs of the internet!”
You’ve also seen the Facebooks ads, I made a zillion dollars online in 5 minutes and look at me on my private jet…✈️
Yeah right tends to be most people’s reaction. And rightly so.
Because all too often the experience looks a LOT more like this…
An empty inbox, an email list full of friends and fam, a serious amount of stress when you see the bank balance dwindling, and a swift return to client work with your tail between your legs…
Butttt in all honesty, my most recent Square Secrets Business course launch did just do over $200k in sales in an hour. I know, I almost had a heart attack when I heard those numbers too.
And while bro marketers of the internet might want to make it all sound so easy..
The actual truth is, this $200k of course sales in an hour took almost a YEAR to pull off.
Lemme explain.
Last year I was having a slight crisis.
The internet changed and my business was hurting financially as a result.
First, the marketing strategy I had spent years on, blogging, took a mysterious hit for some unknown reason and I lost HALF my monthly website traffic. Poof!
Then just a couple months later, Apple decided to pick a fight with Facebook and left small businesses like mine in the middle of the blood bath.
Ad costs went through the roof 💰 and within weeks I decided, those were NOT the kind of profit margins I was okay with. So we pulled all our Facebook ad spend.
Meaning, we were fighting a battle on two fronts, our two major marketing strategies were hit at the exact same time.
And let me say, building up marketing strategies like these took us legitimately years to nail and do correctly…
We knew we had a real problem on our hands.
With our marketing strategies hit, that led to a direct revenue impact.
Our evergreen funnels 🌱 which had always faithfully brought in sales week in and week out suddenly didn’t anymore…
Followed by me coming to the shocking realization that the #1 indicator of my business being healthy, that is my email list growth, also stopped growing 📈.
PANICCC!!!
We began stagnating, we’d add new people to the list with the traffic we still had, but people would unsubscribe at the same rate, meaning our audience was no longer growing.
Our launches started seeing a similar pattern, yeah we could do a $100k or $150k in a launch like we always did, but we weren’t hitting the growth goals that I had set…
Oh and pssst - if you’re wondering if your course idea also has 6 figure potential my quiz linked below will help you find out! 👇
Also I should clarify, I have a team now. And one of them has a child. So this business has legit expenses and I take paying those expenses and my team very seriously, because a toddler actually relies on me making money to eat.
No pressure.
So I needed to find a solution, and fast 🦸♀️.
But I knew, when I had hastily slapped together marketing efforts in the past, they had NOT gone well.
I needed a lead generation solution, preferably pronto. But also not so pronto that it would be done quickly and badly.
I looked at my options…
Pinterest ads
YouTube ads
Google ads
PR
Podcasting
YouTubing
Social media
Speaking
Affiliates
now I’d run an affiliate program before, butttt it hadn’t gone so well.
We previously threw together a really last-minute affiliate program a coupla years back and it wasn’t exactly the home run I was hoping for.
At the time we had been doing $140k launches, and with affiliates, we still had a $140k launch. Our sales were legit the exact same as when we launched without affiliates. Except now we were paying out a percentage of sales to affiliates so we were making less profit… whomp whomp…
And when we looked at the data, HALF of the sales credited to affiliates were people who had already been on our email list before, so therefore they would have heard about the sale regardless of the affiliate talking about it. 🤦♀️
So we weren’t actually getting in front of new a new audience as we had hoped for and it wasn’t growing our sales either.
Granted, I’ve learned that there’s a VERY big difference between implementing something and implementing it well and if I’m really honest with myself, I knew we hadn’t necessarily done it well before, so I was willing to take a second crack at it.
But this time we were going to do our affiliate program differently.
Instead of just getting other affiliates in my industry as I had before who therefore had a lot of list overlap with me, I’d get affiliates who had complimentary courses and topics to mine…
As I was selling a course on being a Squarespace website designer, complimentary affiliates were in the Virtual Assistant, branding and copywriting industries.
Those are the types of service providers who are alwaysss asked if they also offer website design as a service and are therefore missing out big time by not offering it, which my course would teach them to do.
We got in touch with other business owners who fit the bill as
1. Having a fair sized email list and
2. Who had a complimentary audience, but not necessarily the SAME audience as us.
We pitched a LOT of affiliates, I think around 80 people in order to get a total of 19 onboarded affiliates.
Next we got to know our affiliates.
Before we had just given them a link and called it a day, but we knew we didn’t need people with links, we needed passionate educated affiliates who treated this launch like their own.
So my team and I did 1:1 calls with every affiliate individually to get to know them, educate them on our product, and talked about launch goals with them and how many sales they wanted to bring in.
Plus we also asked them what kinds of gifts 🎁 would be exciting to them as affiliate prizes and reward ladders were going to be a big part of this new affiliate program!
Then we spent legit months, I’m talking 6 months, preparing everything!
We had to…
figure out a new checkout card software that would work with the style of affiliate program we wanted
get together an affiliate contract
do calculations on how we were going to allocate funds to the different prize categories
we put together a mammoth affiliate guide
wrote affiliates almost sales 20 emails
prepared graphics for them
& put together a training on how to best sell courses as some of them had past experience doing so but others didn’t.
We also offered to give a training or Q+A to their audience to warm them up, either as an Instagram live, YouTube live, a podcast interview, a training in membership communities or in a Facebook group.
This was WAY more work and way more personal and in-depth than our last foray into the affiliate world.
We legit had one team member just dedicated to this and our tech team member was also swamped with the setup of this program for months.
Not was this taking us way more time than we originally expected, but we had a new problem on our hands, which I fully admit was my fault...
We actually went MONTHS without doing a big launch in this business, mostly because every one of my friends weddings that was supposed to happen in 2020 and 2021 happened this summer, meaning I spent from April to August flying around the world going to weddings, polished off by the experience of a lifetime, meeting Richard Branson on his island in September, meaning I didn’t work much all summer.
When I got home to London in September after living it up at weddings all summer and looked at our bank account, it wasn’t looking as cheery and full as usual… oops
Don’t worry, I plan to cut some friends so I don’t have as many weddings to go to.
Kidding.
Kind of…
Thankfully the business made it through the summer of weddings and no launches and we spent months playing the long game with our team focused on the affiliate launch for months in hopes of a serious win and uptick in sales, and boy did it pay off!
Here’s how the math from our affiliate launch broke down.
2,300 people joined the bootcamp in time for the live trainings
Between 350 and 450 people showed up live to the trainings
On the 3rd day of the training I pitched my course Square Secrets Business, we had a 24% conversion rate from people live on the training to a buyer within 1 hour
Meaning we welcomed 82 new students in 1 hour
The course cost depends on when they bought and if they bought a bundle of courses or not, so the average purchase price over the launch was $2,669.73
About half of people paid on payment plans and half paid in full, meaning we collected $111,564.40 in cash in the house, but made sales that would be fully paid over the next few months totaling just about $220k in the hour.
Now to put that into context for you, our normal week of a course launch would do $140k usually.
I knew from seeing how many people joined our pre-launch bootcamp that this sale was going to be bigger than our normal $100k sales, but I didn’t know just how big it would be.
I opened our inbox while on the training and saw just page upon page of sales notifications.
We made more sales in 1 hour more than we normally did in an entire week.
I was first just thrilled to welcome such an amazing group into the course, but it was equally amazing to know our months of hard work and bet on the affiliate program solving our leads problem and stagnating sales paid off.
It was a rough ride the previous year hoping and praying for a serious win on this launch and it was both equal parts thrilling and relieving knowing I had made the right call, we put our efforts into the right marketing strategy and that playing the long game paid off.
As you can see, while we did make over $200k in an hour with our affiliates help, it actually took us months of work to pull it off.
Now I truly believe anyone…
you,
yes you,
can also do a $200k launch if you implement an affiliate program well.
Butttt I’ll be honest, if you miss this one key thing, no number of affiliates will save you…
Watch this video next to learn what that one key thing is and how you can do it well!
