Website Traffic for Free via Social Media
With a social media affiliate marketing program, you can get your current customers to promote your products on social media for free.
To motivate them, you’ll offer them a percentage of any sales they refer to you – an affiliate commission.
You’ll also give them “social media sharing” options so that they can promote your website and your products to their friends and followers.
Intro to LeadDyno for Affiliate (Referral) Marketing 3-26-15 from Brett Owens on Vimeo.
Hey everyone, thank you for joining me today. This is Brett Owens from LeadDyno. I’m going to walk you through basically everything in LeadDyno, exactly how I use the system to manage our own affiliates, walk you through the example exactly of our sister company, how we basically ramp up affiliates using LeadDyno, how we give them their links, how we give them their login to their Affiliate Dashboard, social sharing, how we pay them out, all that good stuff. So I know many of you are already on the system, a bit maybe familiar with it, so I will move quick. I’ll probably get through everything that I’ve got to say in about 15 or 20 minutes. Happy to take questions either throughout or afterwards. Just go ahead and type those into the GoToWebinar panel. I’ll take your questions either on the fly or afterwards and happy to circle back anything you’d like to see in more detail. I’m happy to do that.
But with that, we’ll get started. What we’re looking at here is our Affiliate Dashboard. So this is where I send people who ask if we have an affiliate program or when I advertise our customers to get them to join our affiliate program. This is the page that I send them to. So specifically, I’m sending them to a page that’s at mydomain.leaddyno.com. This is the page that you have. So if you’ve already signed up with us, you’ve got a page like this too. By out of the box, we, us in LeadDyno we’re going to host this for you.
You’re welcome to IFrame it into your own site if you would like to do that. Otherwise, we’ve got some other customization, so you can do as I’ve done here. I’ve changed the colors here so they’re the blue that matches up with our company colors and logo here in the upper left.
You’re also welcome to change the welcome message if you want. And then this is where your affiliates are going to go to sign up. And all we require out of them is an email address, so it’s a really easy process for them to get signed up.
Now, if you want to require approval, as in you have to approve everyone, everyone has to be approved by you until they become an affiliate, that’s an option. That’s a setting. I’ll show you where that setting is in a little bit. But that’s a setting that you can turn on. By default, I just let anyone sign up for our affiliate program, because it’s no work on my part to have an extra affiliate out there with links potentially sending us traffic.
I’ll show you how we can use LeadDyno to automate a lot of the management side. So that’s why I personally just let everyone sign up, but you’re welcome to do as you’d like on that one.
So after affiliates sign up here, they put in their email address, maybe a name. They are passed through to our Affiliate Dashboard. This gives them basically everything that they need to start promoting your site, your product. So this here is a case of our good friend and reseller, Sam. Sam has a site called Lawyerist. And what I did for Sam is I gave him an affiliate code with his website name in that. So that’s what I usually do for people is I’ll give them an affiliate code that matches up maybe with their company name or their website name or just their own name, their first/last name.
What this gives us is a couple of things. One is that this referral link right here, it gives us a co-branded type field on this link. So when Sam posts this link, it’s a friendly hand-off to his readers sending them our way. So we’ve got that sort of co-branded feel here on the referral link.
The other advantage of an affiliate code is for our folks who use Shopify or BigCommerce or Stripe for your checkouts. If Sam does a referral offline, so anyone he refers from this link is going to be credited to him, either if they buy from us the same day or maybe they come back a year later, we’re still going to credit that to Sam. But if they do not come from this link, we can have them type in a discount code. So he could give out this discount code, say, if he’s talking in person or he’s at a trade show. He could give out this code. Say, the person’s going through your Shopify store then or your BigCommerce store, so they can put in this code. Sam would then, we’ll still be able to track that credit back to him. So we’d match up the affiliate code with the discount code. So that’s another way where that would be used.
So he’s got his referral link here. He’s welcome to copy and paste this. Again, he’s going to get credit for any traffic he sends. Also got some on-click buttons here that are pretty easy. What it’ll do is it’ll log him into Facebook, as you’ll see in my case here. Basically, it’s logging me into Facebook. It’s got a post already pre-written and ready to go. And now I’m going to post this to my wall. It’s going to post for my friends and followers are going to see this. Anyone who clicks through, the affiliate’s going to get credit for it. So Sam posts this to his wall, he’s going to get credit for every click that goes through. Everyone who eventually buys as a result of that click, he’s going to get credit for that as well.
So nice thing on this is he just clicks the Facebook button. We’ve got a post written here. He can add something if he’s feeling creative, but he doesn’t have to. He can just share this thing and it’s off and running.
Well, the same thing, we’ve got all social media plugins here. So same, we’ve got Twitter as well. Same idea, we just prepopulate a tweet. We get you logged in. If you want to edit the tweet, you’re welcome to. And the tweet contains your affiliate link in here.
And then same for email. We’ve got an email that can go out. All of these links that you see in the email, these then flip to affiliate links when they are sent out. So they’re flipped to the specific affiliate link of a person who sends it out. So all Sam needs to do, enter a few email addresses here and his email will then go out on his behalf.
So that’s the social sharing. So this is why we always want people coming back to the Affiliate Dashboard, because this is where they’re most likely to share their link. All the messaging in these things, so for example, just going back to this Facebook post, all the messaging in here, you might notice I’ve got a certain theme here. We released an infographic a couple of weeks ago, and I let our affiliates know, “Hey, this infographic is something that you guys can use. And I’ve got a version with your affiliate link.” So all the social sharing we’ve got currently is geared around this infographic.
But I do change it up about once a month. I like to keep it fresh for our affiliates so that every time they come in here and share on Facebook, they can share something new. Obviously, they’re not sharing it on Facebook every day, but I want them to be able to share our stuff on Facebook, say, once a month or once every few weeks and have it be fresh, keep that fresh. So have them tweeting out their affiliate links every few weeks and have it be fresh stuff.
So we get them coming back here. How do we get them coming back here? Well, we always let them know how they’re doing. So we’ve got their progress updated in real time so they can see how many visitors they’ve sent us, how many signups they have, and how many people have actually bought. And then their commissions are totaled down here, so we see how many commissions due he has or what’s been paid out as well.
So I mentioned Sam also has a website. This is where he can get banner ads for his website. This is also where he can even get a version of that famous infographic I was telling you about. And this is going to have his affiliate link in here. So I’ve got this big old infographic. So all he needs to do to post this on his website is just grab the HTML of the infographic. Already got his affiliate link in here. And then he’s going to get credit for everyone who clicks through.
Same with these smaller banners, so these 300x250s. These all have his affiliate link in here. So he can either just copy-paste the HTML or send it off to his web person.
Okay, we also do affiliate newsletters. So we’ve got some archives of affiliate newsletters here. Let me show you an example, and this is actually the newsletter that I sent out a couple of weeks back, again, just giving all of our affiliates a general update. I always like to send this out after payments go out. So I let everyone know, “Hey, we paid your February commissions. If you didn’t receive it for any reason, just let us know.”
I pay out with PayPal. I’m actually going to show you how to do that in a little bit. So I just give them a heads-up. February is always good, a good lead in, commissions have been paid. I share some new stuff that we have on the way, new features in our case. Maybe you have a new product. Your affiliates love to hear that stuff first. And then I gave them the promo stuff. So the little infographic . . . And again, I always keep them coming back to the Affiliate Dashboard. So I’m like, “Hey, if you want to share this now, click here, come back, and then you’re on your Affiliate Dashboard. And then we’re just a click away from sharing stuff.
And then let’s see, so this is actually the admin view. I’m going to get to the admin view in a minute here. A final thing I’ll show you here on the Affiliate Dashboard is the subIDs. This is a case where if an affiliate wants to link to a blog article, and I actually had an affiliate ask this earlier in the week, because she wrote an article for our blog. She wanted to link to that article, but she wanted an affiliate link, okay. So the way for her to do that, just go to her Affiliate Dashboard, the SubIDs tab, enters the URL for that blog post, create the link. And then that’s going to give her that special affiliate link. We’re going to give her credit for anyone that she sends through to that blog post. So if those people later buy from us, then she’s going to get credit for that.
So it’s a nice way to promote either specific content, like in the case of a blog. With the sub-IDs, another example here is that you can use it as well for a specific product. So if you want to link to a specific product, you can do that here too.
Okay, so let’s get back into LeadDyno. Let me show you where we’re going to set all of this up. So our Configure Affiliate Website tab here, this is where . . . Remember, I said we got a custom logo in here. We can do all the custom header, colors. This is where you do that, under Configure Affiliate Website. This is where you can turn on, enable IFrame mode here at the bottom if you want to embed it on your site. We also take custom CSS files if you really want to style that page. And then that affiliate approval I was telling you about, that’s here too as well. So you can add affiliate approval here.
And then we’ve got ways to update the messaging too, so that’s going to be the next option here. The Content Library is where we’re going to update that Facebook post, so that post that I showed you . . . Again, let me get back to that Affiliate Dashboard here. Okay, so that post, the one I said, “Okay, let’s share this link.” Here’s the Facebook post. So here’s the body of that post. So again, I got here, under Affiliate Content, Content Library. And then I’ve got all my primary stuff here. That’s what you see on the main page. So primary Facebook post, I go to edit it here. And then this is where we’ve got what actually is going into that post. Okay, so subject to the post, you can send the URL. You can send it either to your homepage or you can send it to somewhere else other than your homepage here too.
So Content Library, basically where we load all of this stuff up. Marketing Materials tab as well, this is where you can load up this tab here, so the banners . . . So go to Add Content, Add Banner, and then basically just choose a file, just upload your banner [inaudible 00:11:07]. And that’s how you’re going to get this up to the Marketing Materials tab.
Okay, so Content Library is a good one. The Affiliate Newsletter, which I showed you, is actually the last one down here. I’m just going to jump around a minute since we already showed you this one. So that Chrometa Affiliate Newsletter that I sent out, that’s up here. That’s how I did that. To do a new affiliate newsletter, just click New Affiliate Newsletter down here and then this is the newsletter body. So again, this is how we’re going to write up something for our affiliates, send it out. Pretty straightforward. So we got a little email editor here in LeadDyno. We already have your affiliates’ email addresses, so easy enough for us to power your affiliate newsletter here as well.
Okay, couple of cool little automation features I want to share with you here. This is a newer feature. Works really well for us. Works really well for a lot of our users. Really encourage you to use this one. It’s an Affiliate Invitation Email. What this is is when people buy from you, this is going to invite them to join your affiliate program. So this sends an email. I’ve actually got this email mostly pre-written for you, so you’re welcome to just sign your name to it. Or if you want to add the details of what you’re offering with your affiliate program, you’re welcome to do that. But basically, you’re telling your customers that, hey, you appreciate the purchase. Word-of-mouth marketing is important thing for you, so you preach it, spreading the word, if they spread the word about your product. And then here is where they can sign up for your affiliate program, so you can also compensate them if they are able to send business your way. So this is a great way to get new affiliates, especially from your customer base. I imagine when you sign up with LeadDyno, this is the first time watching our affiliate program. You’ll probably want to send out an email newsletter to your customers, letting them know that you now have an affiliate program. I’m sure you have many asking you before if you had one, so now you can let them know that you have one. And I’m sure you’ll mention it again going forward, but this is a good way to get the newest customers on board, especially at a time when they’re really happy with you, when they just bought something from you. So Affiliate Invitation Email, just come in here and make sure this is enabled. You can read over the copy. If you want to make any edits, you’re welcome to do that.
Okay, and then our Automated Affiliate Emails, these are cool as well. These basically help you send emails out to affiliates on your behalf when certain things happen. For example, when they sign up for your program, you can send them this welcome email. So their pass through to the Affiliate Dashboard, as I showed you . . . But here’s a way where you can give them all the information that they need. So it gives them basically their referral link again, custom link into their Affiliate Dashboard. So all these variables are going to obviously replace when this email goes out to them. And then all they have to do is bookmark it. For example, I’ve got an Affiliate Dashboard. This is one of our customers. I was just promoting one of his products actually, just having some fun. But I was sending some of the affiliate clicks his way. And then this is my Affiliate Dashboard for his product, for his site, Get On Fleek.
So all I need to do to access his, I just bookmark it, and then I can see my progress. So I’ve sent 30 visits his way. I’ve got one signup. Nobody’s bought yet. But I’m able to see where I’m at. And then again, I can share my link in here and post it to Facebook if I want to get some more traffic going his way.
So from your affiliates’ standpoint, that’s all they need to do. So this is really the only link they ever need is that link to their Affiliate Dashboard. So you can get that out to them in this welcome email.
A couple more automated emails, we can give them a weekly update email, let them know how they did for the week. So that’s going to look something like this. So we just give them a heads-up. Here’s the traffic you sent for the last week. Here’s your leads, purchases. And again, the link into that dashboard, so they can get all the real-time data. And then it can also do emails out to them if they send you a new lead and/or if they have a new purchase. So if they got a new commission, we email them. So that new commission email that I sent out personally looks like this. So pretty straightforward, but I just let them know and say, “Hey, thanks for referring so and so.” I do let them know who so and so is. You can edit the email if you do or do not want to let them know. We’ve got some variables here in the template, so you can put in like the first name, last name of the person that they referred to you. But I do let them know. I just give them the email address. And then I always send them back to that Affiliate Dashboard. I say, “Thanks, here’s where you can go back to that Affiliate Dashboard that’s going to have your stats updated there in real time, all your commissions in real time.” And of course we’ve got all the social sharing.
All right, and I got one more thing to show you, and then we’ll get into questions. I see a couple questions coming in already, so that’s great. So if you have questions, go ahead, type those in. I’m going to wrap up my portion and show you I guess the part that affiliates get most excited about. So as you’ve probably noticed, a lot of what we do is geared towards keeping affiliates engaged, keeping them motivated, keeping them in the loop on stuff. What keeps them, gets these guys really motivated, of course, is when we pay them. And here’s how we pay affiliate commissions.
The way I do it, and the way I would say the majority of our customers do it is with our PayPal integration. And it’s pretty straightforward. You don’t really even have to set anything up. LeadDyno’s going to calculate the commissions for you based on whatever commission plan you set up. And if you need help with specifics of setting up a commission plan, you can let us know. We’re happy to help you with that.
So the commissions are accrued. So as people buy from you, we track who the referring affiliate was, what commission plan are they on. And then here’s where we can pay those commissions. So I come in here, and basically at the end of each month, I look and see what affiliates do I owe. Yeah, I usually just pay more than like . . . if I owe them more than $50, I’ll pay them out. So I’ve got a couple of options, but as I said, I use the PayPal option. So I just click the PayPal button. What that does is it tees up a PayPal request going out to that person. So in this case, let me just pay . . . I know I don’t know Malcolm more than $50, but let’s just send Malcolm some money for the weekend.
Okay, so what I do is I log into PayPal. I say, okay, for faster checkout I want to skip this login next time. And now it tees up that payment out to Malcolm. It’s coming from our company account. I say, okay, and I pay, and now we’re good. So now Malcolm is marked off as paid, and then we move on to the next person if I was doing them all at once. So I’ll actually wait until the end of the month to pay out Laurie here. And actually, I usually stay on top of my affiliate commissions just because I do these demos a couple of times a week. And I usually pay out somebody just to show you how it works. So that’s basically how it works. Now, if Laurie told me, “Hey, I’d rather have a check this month, rather than PayPal,” that’s fine. What I would do is I would just cut Laurie a check, send it to her in the mail, and mark her off as manually paid.
We also have a couple of other options as well, other than PayPal. So it would be Dwolla and Coinbase would the alternatives we have there.
So that’s what I had. Let me just show you . . . I know we got questions. We’ll get into those in one minute here. Let me just show you a new feature that we have. It’s so new, we don’t even have the documentation on, because we just shipped it this week. But we’ve got a new sharing widget that you can put on any page of your site. It basically works like Amazon. So let me just show you with an Amazon product.
Okay, so if I look at Baby Registry, okay, baby earmuffs, here we go. Okay, so I got baby earmuffs. I am buying from Amazon. See, I’ve got this little share thing here where I can share. And if I click the Facebook, it’s basically going to share . . . It’s going to log me into Facebook, and then it’s going to know that I’m sharing the baby earmuffs, so it knows we’ve got this product here. This is exactly what you can do with our sharing widget.
Let me go back to LeadDyno here, if I can find LeadDyno. Okay, so this little widget here, you can tell we got our creative inspiration from Amazon here. But this is where you can post. So you can have people who are on your site post that product to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or share it on email. And our widget is going to know what product you’re looking at. So we’re taking that information from the page. This is cool, because you know the primary stuff on the Affiliate Dashboard, they’re sort of one message here. If you do the sharing widget, so you have multiple products, we’ll share any product that’s on your site. And then that message will be customized when the user shares it. So this is pretty cool. We’re happy to help you set this up since we’re just coming out with the documentation and training materials on this. Basically, that’s what this widget here does. I just wanted to point this out [inaudible 00:20:07]. It’s a new feature, and I think it’s going to be very cool.
And with that, okay, questions. Can we set automated? So if you have questions, go ahead and type those in the GoToWebinar panel. A question I’ve got, can you set automated kill days on subscription payout. For example, if someone is a reseller, they sign up. Can we set their commission to run for a year and then stop automatically and individually for each of them when their signup occurred?
Yes, and let me take you through the commission setup. I’m sorry, I want to go to Configure Commissions. Okay, so I’ve got my payments in here. Okay, so I got this payment here. This is repeating monthly. So yeah, if you want to only repeat it not indefinitely, but only for 12 months, you would just go 12, 1, 2 in here, and then say payments. So I’ve got a monthly payment that’s going out on this plan. If you want to kill it at some point, just put the number of months that you want here. So otherwise, you’re basically paying it out monthly, and then we’re going to kill it here. Although, I don’t actually want to change my . . . let me cancel out of that. I don’t actually want to change this thing or screw anything up. But yeah, that’s the way to do it. If you have specific questions, okay cool. If you have specific questions, you’ll find us on live chat in the lower left so we can kind of walk you through it in real time.
Someone else had a question on tracking Facebook ads that’s on your site. Can you show me how to set that up?
Yeah, so to track up Facebook ads, the way to do that is do it with a tracking campaign. And we actually got a whole different resource on this, so I’ll show you a bit now. We actually do different training session on this. So it’s under our Tour, Facebook Ad Tracking. Go through the gory details, AdWords to, but let me show you quickly now how we do this.
A tracking campaign link is basically an analogous link to like an affiliate link. So we can track the source. In this case, since we don’t have affiliates, we’re using it for stuff as if we’re buying. So in our case we buy Facebook ads, we buy AdWords. But I want to see how they do. My issue with Facebook and AdWords conversion code, they can show me somebody got to a certain page, but can’t tell me if they bought something. So what I do in LeadDyno, I come in here. I say I want to create a new tracking campaign link. It gives me a link. It looks like this. This is a link that I can put in my Facebook ads or my AdWords ads, and I can see specifically what the progress is for that campaign. So you see here, I’ve got my wholesale’s funnel for this campaign. How many visits, leads, and purchases I got from it. And then in terms of number of the customers, I can see specifically who bought as a result of this ad.
So to your question on Facebook, basically just make sure you put in this tracking link when Facebook asks you right off the bat what site you want to promote. This is the site. So don’t just put in your site. Put in the LeadDyno tracking link. We don’t redirect or anything, so it is a link to your site. It just allows us to track that traffic as people go through.
Okay, so it looks like we’re good on everything, questions, so let me just wrap up here, show you how to get in contact with us. First, you’re welcome to reply, any emails that you got from me confirming your attendance today. You can reply to any of those. If you want to just circle -back one-on-one on anything. But on our contact page, you will never miss our live chat on our website. That’s here seven days a week. And we’ve got our phone number down here and our support info as well and emails and such. And then within the application, so if you’ve already signed up, you can start a chat here in the lower left.
So that’s how to find us. I hope this was helpful for you. Please stay in touch. Let us know how everything’s going with your affiliate program, getting ramped up. And let us know how we can help. So thanks again for joining. I hope it was helpful, and I hope we can talk to you soon.
