Every once in a while I find myself on an affiliate leaderboard for a product I’ve been promoting. Most of the time it’s a surprise. For example a couple of years ago or so I won $300 as an affiliate for Coach Glue. Initially I didn’t even realize they were having an affiliate contest but when I found out I was in the running to win something, I got motivated and gave it a go.
That’s what’s so awesome about affiliate contests and getting on an affiliate leaderboard. It’s motivating. It’s fun. It’s exciting! Of couse that’s a win-win for all involved.
If you’re not familiar with an Affiliate Leaderboard here’s the deal:
Every so often a product owner will hold an affiliate contest. During a set timeline the product owner will offer prizes (cash or other) to top and sometimes random affiliates as a reward for promoting their products and earning sales.
I’m an affiliate for quite a large number of products and programs. Most of the time I just promote programs as it seems to fit with what I’m teaching or talking about at the moment. I don’t pay a lot of attention to launch schedules or big JV events, etc. I’m more concerned about getting the right information to the right peeps at the right time.
So I was taken by surprise on Thursday night when I was friended by the owner of eCover Authority, Chad Ejisr. I had seen my friend Kelly McCausey promote this product a few months back and had meant to go check it out. I knew it was something that would be a PERFECT fit to share with my readers and so as soon as I saw the link to Chad’s affiliate contest I knew I wanted to promote it. I signed up as an affiliate right away and the next day started promoting as soon as the little baby girl was napping.
Here’s my day one results:
On day one of this particular promotion I found out that I was at the top of the leaderboard. With a $3000 cash prize up for grabs for the top affiliate I was pretty surprised to hear I was leading!
I have to tell ya I’m not really a competitive type person but being told you’re in the lead to win such a large prize gives you motivation to keep it up!
And keep it up I did. As of day four (yesterday) I had slipped to the #2 spot (which is still a $1000 prize):
Here’s where I’m going to list out the whole process of what I’ve done to this point to attempt to hold that top stop. As of now while I write this (Tuesday night) the contest is still running so what I’ll do is come back after publishing and update you with the (hopefully great) news of how it all panned out.
The first thing I did on Friday was email my list. Here’s email one:
After I sent this one I got a question about the time zone so I quickly fixed up another email to clarify, which was basically the same as the one above with the time zone of the initial sale added.
Now at 1pm I sent out another email. In my rush to promote this program on launch day I misundertood that the price was going up in increments to $37, not all at once at 2pm like I thought. So I created a bigger ‘urgency’ than was actually there… and it worked. Obviously I don’t recommend creating any kind of fake urgency as that would be very unethical (like I said mine was an absolute accident) but what you CAN do is definnitely take advantage of any REAL urgency built-in to any product sales.
Here’s the email I sent a 1pm:
You’ll notice this email is almost exactly the same just with a different subject and a little of the first wording edited.
The next thing I did was create a post on my facebook page and I shared it in two of my groups (Website Design Mojo & Laptop Lifestyle Business Club):
In my original posts I had told people I’d give them a free Look ‘Over My Shoulder’ workshop just for signing up for eCover Authority. I had no details other than that yet and hadn’t even picked a date. I didn’t have anything set up for it so I got to work setting up some details and picking a date.
I created a page on my site to give people the details on the workshop and to invite them to buy eCover Authority. Here’s a screenshot and if you want to look at the page it’s here (while you’re there you should buy eCover Authority) <img src="http://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/72x72/1f609.png" alt="