Provide Affiliate Resources and Reporting Through Your Membership Site Memberium

[00:00] Micah: Hey everybody, it's Micah Mitchell with Membarium and we have with us Mary Kay of Convertmore Consulting. Mary Kay has been doing this stuff for 15 years at least. She's been around since the very, very early days of Membarium helping our customers build membership sites. She is an expert and helps some interesting business owners. So we're going to jump into it. It's all about kind of membership sites and courses and communities typically. But today we're going to talk about a couple different use cases for a software like Membarium or in other words, for a membership site besides selling your content. Mary Kay, thank you so much for joining. Welcome.

[00:36] Mary Kay: Thank you, Micah. I'm super excited to be here. This is great.

[00:39] Micah: Well, you have been doing work and you have a team around you, of course, but you're very involved in the work. So I'm excited to hear about some of the projects you've been working on. Let's talk first about the customers you serve for a moment because you used the word transformational. And I was going to ask you, but I wanted to ask you on the interview, what's different about your clients? What do you mean by transformational?

[01:04] Mary Kay: Yeah. So I actually fell into marketing quite by accident as I was transitioning from a career, almost a 20 year career in exercise physiology into coaching. I kind of had a bug to have my own business and coaching was a very short step between what I'd been already doing for all of those years. And what I accidentally discovered was that I had an aptitude and a real love for marketing. And most of my early days colleagues at that time really didn't like the marketing thing that kind of made them squeamish. And so I simply moved in that direction quite unexpectedly. And that was nearly 18 years ago. And I have just kind of stuck with that niche. I have had a number of clients that were kind of on the edges of that. But at the end of the day, it's really I like to work with folks who really believe they want to make a difference with their business in some way, shape or form. And that's a very broad description. But a lot of our clients do fall under that kind of coach, author, transformational leader, thought leader type of person. And they're bringing forth ideas or information that fits perfectly into what we do for membership sites and for course development, right? Because that's what those folks are primarily doing. And it's just been a market that I don't know if I've stuck with it or it has stuck to me, one or the other. But we really enjoy working with that group.

[02:35] Micah: Awesome. And we've had you on before. We actually did a kind of case study showing one of your customer sites that is more of a traditional membership and course thing. But tell us what we're going to see today. So in terms of non-membership, non-course functionality, what do you like to use it for?

[02:53] Mary Kay: Yeah. So about, gosh, probably eight years ago or so, I had been working with a company. The Shift Network, which is a very large content producer in the transformational learning space. They work with many, many, many different authors and teachers. And what I have been doing on their team for the past 14 years has been running their affiliate program. And so as that affiliate program grew, the back end of what was then Infusionsoft, most

[03:26] Micah: recently KeepMax Classic, and now I think we call it KeepUltimate, but the good old full

[03:34] Mary Kay: service original Infusionsoft, the affiliate portal was quite unwieldy for the volume of launches that we were running. And so back when we developed this, we were probably running three to four course launches each and every month and at least one summit. Well, if you fast forward that to 2023, where we've just closed 2023, we were running closer to eight to 12 course launches, plus evergreens, plus one to two summits every single month. So this was, this is a multi eight figure business that was converting a solid eight figures annually through the affiliate program. And so the back end of the Keep system just did not, was not working for us. So for a while we went to email, email distribution of copy and et cetera, all the promotional materials that these many thousands of affiliates were needing to pick up and utilize to promote. And then that just, that just really wasn't getting the job done. And so as soon as Membarium began working towards an affiliate module within the, within the plugin, we really jumped right on it. And they began to develop a site that is exclusively for these affiliate partners or affiliates. And it has made a tremendous difference in the workload that happens on the backend, just the overall presentation, the ease it is. If you're an affiliate, a lot of the affiliates for this company are fairly unsophisticated. And so they needed a way to like, just log in and see a picture of what it is that they, that they're going for and they'll go get it and to be able to copy and paste. And the whole thing had to be super simple. And so that's what we were able to develop utilizing Membarium for this particular site that I'm going to show you just a little bit.

[05:38] Micah: Cool. So the affiliates are the members of the site. They're logging in, they're getting all of their information. I'm assuming they're getting some stats and things like that. If you want to pull the site up where I would like to start, and this is maybe a curve ball if possible is where did the affiliates come from? Where do they sign up? Cause I want to kind of track their journey of, okay, I became an affiliate and then I, I log into the site or, you know, cause I'm sure people out there want to have affiliates. And if they don't, you know, how do we get them as well?

[06:08] Mary Kay: Yeah, that's it. That's definitely a big conversation. All right. So I've got the site pulled up and I can just let me know when you want me to share screens, but basically the way the affiliate customer journey works for this particular company, there's, there's effectively, um, three primary tracks. One is someone who just loves the content that the shift network produces and they want to promote it. They might have a very small kind of a localized list. Maybe they are a local practitioner. Maybe they're a local yoga studio. It could be any one of a number of things, right? And they have a small list. They want to share this content and this programming. Great. Um, we also have some larger, what we would call more traditional affiliate marketers that either we have found over the years or that have found us. Um, and so that, that audience is in this group as well. The other group that finds us though, or I shouldn't say finds us that we kind of find them. And that is that our faculty, the faculty for the shift network, as well as summit speakers, they are all operating as affiliates. Every single one of those relationships has a promotional component to it. And that promotion is tracked across, no matter if you come in as a faculty and you're teaching a course for the shift network, and then you're going to, um, turn around and offer that course to your list, for example, even if you're faculty, you're going to make affiliate commission. So all of these different types of relationships at the end of the day have that affiliate component to them. And so we needed a way to manage them. So if you are, uh, if you've come in through that first track, you love shift programming and you're like, wow, this looks great. I'd like to make some extra dollars sharing this with my audience. Great. You would enroll through the affiliate registration form. Um, and for that, just so folks kind of have a full array of the, of the, uh, technology that we use. We really like gravity forms that, uh, and one reason we love gravity forms is that gravity forms is also integrated or integratable with memberium. And so if someone fills out a form, then I can populate certain fields, et cetera, uh, in keep utilizing some memberium functionality. So that works on the registration side as well as on some other, uh, capacities that we use it for. So they register. We do have, as you might imagine for a company that large, we absolutely do have an approval process, uh, because it's very easy to get bad actors coming in through an open-ended affiliate program.

[08:49] Micah: So if anybody wants a pro tip on that, do approve your affiliates, take a look at it before you let them in.

[08:56] Mary Kay: Um, but once they are approved, then they are sent effectively like any other member would of a membership site. They are sent login information. Here's your username. Here's your password. And some instructions on how to use what we call the portal, the portal, the affiliate portal. Um, and then they can log in and access, uh, what they need. So that's the most basic way that the site is, is utilized.

[09:22] Micah: Cool. Can you show it now? So we were only talking about one of the types of affiliates, but I do like how you also explain that, Hey, we do also have mainstream affiliates. And then some of our speakers, contributors, et cetera, act as affiliates. I think that is likely to happen in a lot of businesses, right? If they've got their own kind of following and all that. Um, go ahead and share your screen whenever you're ready.

[09:45] Mary Kay: Yeah. So let's come in here.

[09:48] Micah: And while she's pulling up her screen, I'll say today's call is brought to you by keep and memberium unofficially by keep. I just happen to have a bunch of their stuff and enjoy wearing it. And then, uh, of course, memberium. All right, go ahead. Uh, Mary Kay.

[10:01] Mary Kay: All right. So this is the, this is the, the front end, uh, pre login. And so obviously we have the opportunity to connect right to support. It can go to the main site. Uh, and then there's the mission is also available, not logged in, but let's just go ahead and log in here. And I'm going to log in first as a test affiliate. So you're effectively logging in here as the subscriber level. And then, and then Mike, if you want me to show you like the page where the, uh, affiliate registration is, then we can, I can actually go onto another screen and we will, I can show you the backend from there.

[10:50] Micah: All right. Yeah. We might get into it, but let's, let's keep going here. So you just logged in as a test affiliate into the members area. Um, go ahead.

[11:01] Mary Kay: Okay. So now that we're logged in, obviously we have a greeting here at the top. Um, and then our navigation across the top includes, this is the most important page. This is the active campaigns page. And that is actually what is also our logged in homepage. This is typical of most sites that we develop. We, we really believe in creating, um, effectively a landing place that is common to all of your members, all of your users, whether they're coming in because they're part of a membership structure, they're coming to log in for their course, or they are coming through, uh, coming through the front door. That's what I call the login page, um, for an affiliate program like this. We want to orient them into all that's possible. And that's what we use the, the login user homepage to help us do. And then once we are on this page, um, so to the left, this will open the keep affiliate dashboard. So if I click this and I can, in just a moment, this is going to open the, uh, information that we don't carry on the portal. So to, if I wanted to track, uh, my clicks for a recent campaign, I would be able to see that information from that dashboard. So the other pieces we have over here, we have some quick links. So the primary interest for this particular company is to get live courses promoted. Uh, the second primary priority is going to be summits. And then they also have a growing body of on-demand or evergreen courses as well. And all three of those are available from the homepage. And we do run a little, uh, a little, it's not a contest. It's just people like to see their name in lights. So we, we do put our top promoters there on a monthly basis. And then here, of course, you can see these are all of the currently available to promote live courses. And when we click through.

[13:10] Micah: I was going to say real quick, I like that format where it's listed almost like you're a member looking at the courses, but it's an affiliate looking to promote the same courses. It's cool. Go ahead.

[13:21] Mary Kay: And very image centric. As I noted, a lot of our affiliates for this company are not, you know, they're not affiliate marketers. Um, they're not particularly savvy. And, um, and what they're interested in is what it is that they're interested in. They want to promote this because either they know the, the faculty member, or they're just really jazzed about the content. More so than anything else. And so the imagery has really helped us quite a bit in, in allowing people to find exactly what they need. And also to promote more than they might otherwise have, because they can see all those images. And so something's going to potentially attract their attention. And so they made a decide to promote this one that they came for and that one that they just realized was also available. So once we are on the individual page and the way that we have set this up, this is built on, um, on the Divi theme, but there's a number of themes that do something similar. So we are in a, uh, standard WordPress post structure is where the content is located. And you mentioned a moment ago, uh, Michael, that you liked kind of how that layout, uh, was on the, the active campaigns homepage. What we're utilizing there is the Divi blog structure on that page and just having it pull through a three by column grid up to, I think it's 12 presentations on that particular setup. Um, and then of course, each of those clicks through to the post page. So it's super simple, super clean. And what will happen is as the, uh, the date range falls off.

[15:02] Micah: So once a date, once a course is out of date in terms of its live promotion, um, that blog structure will automatically lob it off just because of the way that we have programmed it.

[15:13] Mary Kay: And so it reduces our handling on the inside of the site. Basically all that has to happen is my team uploads the content to the individual post with all of the information. And then voila, it's either there or it automatically falls off depending upon the, the date range. So it's super, super handy.

[15:38] Micah: So if I can fill in a few gaps there with you or for anybody who might be trying to do the same thing, when you're talking about kind of posts and all of this, I assume you're saying that when you publish it, you say, Hey, it should be published between this date and that day. And then it just simply unpublishes. It's a genius way to manage this type of promotional thing. I love it. Um, and then are they custom? Did you create a little bit of a custom post type for them? Is that what I'm hearing?

[16:04] Mary Kay: Not a custom post type. Um, and the reason for that is it wasn't really necessary because we don't have, we really only have one post type per se. And it was simple enough for us to use the standard out of the box WordPress post type to do this. We do of course have a template that, uh, our team uses to, for example, we have a particular image of a particular size. It's always located at the top of the page. Um, we have a promotional window, which is going to always be phrased now through and then a date. We have an earnings range. Um, and for, for this particular audience, the earnings range varies on two levels. One is a price point changes depending upon where the offer is in the marketing funnel. And then the second is we actually do have, uh, affiliate levels. Um, not a parent child relationship. Everyone is the same tier as far as parent child, but we, we reward recency and effectiveness of promotion. And so that's where those range ranges come from. This link, I will show you, um, the backend. Uh, but this is, if I was to copy and paste and promote with this link, this is actually this test affiliates referral partner code. So everything presents on the side on an individual affiliate basis that is accurate for that particular affiliate to simply copy and paste the information that is, uh, that is included back here.

[17:53] Micah: Yeah. And I feel like that is a big deal because most affiliates are really just looking for their link. They're just like, where's that link to share, right?

[17:59] Mary Kay: Their link and copy. And sometimes, sometimes the images, um, we do for best results. We recommend that's pretty standard email subject suggestions. There's an awful lot of them. I would probably reduce this by two thirds, but I'm not the boss of that particular piece. So there they are. And then of course the copy all formatted various types of image sizes, et cetera. And then you'll see. There's a, and also, uh, the affiliate support email address is embedded on this page as well. Just if somebody quick and easy needs, needs help right away, they can get that.

[18:41] Micah: Yeah, this is awesome. I'm sure there's a lot of best practices just kind of laced in here that we could go into, but I do like how you're saying every page has, you know, now through whatever as the promotional window. And it's formatted in a way that I'm sure once an affiliate comes in and promotes one and they come back and it's the same. It just kind of gets kind of easier and easier for them. This is a great, um, great, great, great use case of simplicity. Like you're saying, not even a custom post type, just some posts using the Divi thing to show that category or whatever. And a certain number of them. Um, this is a fantastic experience. If you'll go back one page to the homepage, you're talking about how that one button goes into the backend of keep. And for those of you listening, we should point out that this whole, this business here is connected to keep AKA infusion soft, obviously. So once they've logged in, it's using the keep data to, to do some of these things. Like she said, to put the affiliate code directly into the link and then to generate this button here, which automatically logs them in. Go ahead.

[19:45] Mary Kay: And so if you can see at the top here, this is welcome Mary Kay. Hey too. So it logged me into the actual backend on keep side that would allow me then if I wanted to go look at my link tracking stats, for example, to be able to pull those. And I would be able to see my results right, uh, right here in this location. So that's, and we have some, we have a few affiliates that do utilize this. The other thing that they sometimes like to track, um, would be their, their ledger and their earnings, right? They're going to be able to click through that and get an accurate accounting of what they've earned, uh, and so on right here from, from the affiliate, uh, from the affiliate portal on keep. But what they don't have to do in any of your listeners who have done anything at all was to keep backend, um, as far as the, uh, their affiliate portal, it is very confusing back here. To figure out how to generate your link. And so you can just see by the volume of links. I mean, can you imagine sending someone back, even someone savvy would be like, I have absolutely no idea how to get hold of what it is that I need. And so this was the problem that we solved for, uh, by building out the affiliate portal, because there's no, you know, this is just flat text, right? There's nothing to, there's nothing certainly to excite me about any of this stuff. Yeah. I can grab my link if I really work hard at it, but we didn't, we don't want, I don't ever want anybody working hard to support my business. Right. Right. So we wanted to make it super easy. And, uh, and so that was really the, the impetus behind all of this, all of this development.

[21:34] Micah: Yeah. And I'll, I'll say something about affiliates and referral partners, whoever, every bit of work you do to make their life easier. Definitely pays off big time. Cause of course, if you make one member happier, that's great. But if you make an affiliate happier, who can bring you hundreds, potentially thousands of members, it's a big deal. So the difference between, did you make it easier for them and not is big. And also the more effective affiliates, I'm sure, you know, this are typically the more busy people.

[22:01] Mary Kay: They don't have time to, to mess around.

[22:04] Micah: So the fact that they just, they log in right from the email you sent them and it auto logs them into the next place. If they need it, it's graphic, you know, the images and everything. I like all of this. And yeah, just to point out to anybody listening, who's, who's new to affiliates or hasn't done a lot yet. Um, you really, really want to make it easier for them because they can just as easily do nothing right as promote you. And so you want to just make, you want to give them everything that they would possibly need without having to ask you questions and just make it simple.

[22:38] Mary Kay: Exactly. Exactly. And when I have found, you know, as I say, I've been working with this particular client for 14 years and the whole affiliate game has changed so dramatically in that timeframe.

[22:50] Micah: And even for listeners who, um, maybe they shy away from the word affiliate or they, they don't,

[22:57] Mary Kay: they, they really think of that in terms of like, uh, what is it? Clickbank or, you know, posting their stuff over there. This, this, um, structure that keep max classic keep ultimate allows us to create really works. Even if your affiliates are more what you would consider friends and colleagues and they're more partners. And even in that case, again, as you just pointed out, Micah, the easier you make it, the more pleasant the experience, the more high value the experience is for those individuals who you probably know personally, because they're colleagues and friends of yours through, uh, whatever your particular business structure is. Um, I just think that that really does a great service, uh, to that relationship and marketing through partnerships is all about relationships. And so if you can make the relationship really sweet and easy and enjoyable, um, you're going to get much, much better results. So even if you don't think about it in terms of sort of that classic affiliates word, anytime

[23:59] Micah: you're marketing through partners, this can really serve that process. Yeah, absolutely. What other functionality is in here? So we've got the links, we've got the auto login. What else are they doing back here?

[24:14] Mary Kay: Yeah. So, uh, that's going to be the two primary things. So if we come down the page, we can use anchor links or we could use the other, unfortunately, there's no summit that's active right at the moment as we're looking at this. But if there was, there would be another image tile that would give it pretty much the same structure. And then we took, um, we took a shift in just basically just the layout here to feature some of our most popular on-demand courses. So this is allowing us, um, and we usually will adjust this quarterly based on the previous quarter's top performing evergreen or on-demand courses that are now available. Once you're in here, the structure is effectively the same. And then these are all of the on-demand courses. We've got so many of them now, um, that it now has quite a number of pages. Um, but there, cause there's, there's just so many that are, are promotable. But once you click into the structure, it looks very, very similar as what we saw before. The only difference is that the shape of the image is different. It's just another little visual cue, uh, that they are actually in an on-demand program. Um, but some of the other functionality that we have back here is we have a 90 day calendar. And we have built this utilizing one of my favorite free calendar plugins, uh, the modern events calendar. And I probably tried, I don't know, five or six different ones before I stumbled across this one. Um, and the functionality, it, it plays, uh, it plays well with memberium. So I can set up functionality. I have not for this site cause it wasn't needed. Um, but on some of our membership sites or course access sites, I actually layer memberium coding in with the, uh, modern events calendar structure. But for here, what we've done is we've basically utilized a combination of color codes, um, and then a start date. So I can identify if I'm interested in promoting shamanism offers, for example, I can see that there's one that, that promotion will open on the 29th.

[26:27] Micah: And so if I click through that now promotion hasn't opened yet.

[26:32] Mary Kay: So this structure is not yet under that live course list that we looked at initially, but what I can do if I'm really want to promote this is I can add it to my calendar.

[26:43] Micah: And so now I know cause it's on my calendar, what date to come back to the portal and log

[26:50] Mary Kay: in to go get the promotional material for Brandy Tuttle. If that's who I'm, I'm looking forward to promoting. Um, and this particular feature has, is, is used quite, quite heavily. Um, and we didn't know how heavily it was until, uh, we actually had a team change and, uh, she had forgotten to update the 90 day calendar. And I didn't realize that she wasn't doing it. And all of a sudden we were getting inundated with what's happening. Cause we didn't even realize how popular this was, but it definitely people love it. They come in, they click that link, they see the color code of what they're looking for and they, they put it on their calendars and then they come back and they promote.

[27:32] Micah: This is awesome. It's fascinating. First of all, the use case. And then just as like a, another principle of affiliates, I'm sure, you know, this and can add onto it, but this letting them know ahead of time is a big deal. Cause if you say like, Oh, I'm launching this week and you send it to them, they're like, Hey, I've got my mailing calendar planned. I can't help you. You know, how'd you let me know ahead of time? Sure. So this is genius. I love it.

[27:54] Mary Kay: Yep. Yep. And of course this is slightly different than, um, most folks who are launching, they may, maybe they launched two or three, or maybe even six things over the course of a year, right. That they might want to engage partners or affiliates to do this particular business is launching more than eight individual things every single month, uh, plus on demand and evergreen. So it's, um, it's, um, a lot of our, our creativity around how we built this was really from a volume perspective. But in almost every case, there's benefits that could be added back to someone who does not have this level of volume, but just really wants to run maybe two or three very high end, really slick, uh, partner and affiliate driven launches every single year. A structure like this, and you don't have to have it stand as a standalone site. Um, we have added these to many of our clients' membership and course delivery portals as just kind of an extra little part of that. That's only accessible if you have the affiliate access tag, and then you would be able to get back into that particular section of, of a portal that is also handling membership delivery or course delivery or whatever that, that structure is. So it doesn't have to be a standalone. This one is just because of the size of the, of the need.

[29:24] Micah: Gotcha. This is awesome. Let's, you mentioned earlier the signup page that these people go through. Let's check that out. And while you're tracking that down, um, anybody listening or watching who does not yet have an affiliate program or a referral partner program, imagine how much better your business would be if you did, you know, especially if you have a bunch of courses is if each was repositioned as a promotional opportunity, and then you could bring in partners and kind of market those promotional opportunities to them. Um, all right, go ahead, Mary Kay.

[29:56] Mary Kay: Yeah. And you can also, uh, another little piece on that. You can also use the, the tracking structure because that's really what the keep side does is it tracks and it assigns an affiliate partner relative to all of the parameters that you've placed around your affiliate program. But imagine for a moment, let's say you want to invite your course participants to share the love with people they know, right? That's a great marketing strategy.

[30:25] Micah: It's a great way to grow, um, registrants for a program.

[30:30] Mary Kay: Like, cause I know people like me, so I'm going to share with people like me and you are able then to pay me a little jingle, or you can even make it a contest. And rather than making money associated with those referrals, you could just make it a count, right? You can see how many, uh, of the, of your customers referred into a particular program and then provide some kind of a reward system.

[30:53] Micah: But when you do that, if you then put into, um, a Membarium driven WordPress site, this structure,

[31:02] Mary Kay: they never have to, that you don't even have to use the word affiliate. You don't have to confuse them with that language. You just say here, click here and go get, you know, go get the email that you can send to your friends or go get the social media posts that you can put, you know, on, on Facebook. And so you can really create a container utilizing the functionality that doesn't even have to be like an affiliate thing, but it can help you grow your business through referrals. Um, and so that's one option as well.

[31:36] Micah: Yeah, it's a great use case.

[31:38] Mary Kay: And like you said, they don't, it's just a telephrine.

[31:40] Micah: It's not anything more complicated than that, right?

[31:43] Mary Kay: Exactly. But it gives you the ability and we'll show you in just a second, I'll show you the coding on the backend. It gives you the ability to, to create those tracking links for an individual, a customer to be able to send information out and then have that, and then have that tracked. But they don't need to know they're using a tracking link because that kind of sounds weird and scary and marketing, right? But this is just the basic, this is the Gravity Forms. And one of the reasons we went to Gravity Forms, a couple of reasons, and we're just really grateful that the integration with Membarium is so good. But we actually did get some scammers infiltrated this program, probably four-ish years ago now. And fortunately, the accounting team was really eagle-eyed and we caught it fairly quickly. But what we did was, once we had that occur, we wanted to really ramp up the requirements to come in through the proverbial front door. So if you're not a faculty member, you're not, you're not invited by a faculty member to promote, you're not a speaker on a summit, you're just someone coming in, we don't know you. We really wanted to set the bar pretty high in terms of all the information that they need to give us in order to enroll or apply to be an affiliate. And we didn't want to, we didn't want to muck up because some folks will remember this, but back in the day, we only had 100 custom fields in Keep. And so those were really easy to burn through. And so I didn't want to like burn up a whole bunch of Keep level custom fields with, with really what was just how it was I was going to ask them for a whole lot more information. I didn't really care other than I wanted them to jump through the hoops to give it to me. So that's the Gravity Forms has allowed us to do that because it allows us to have conditional things and just a whole lot of content and information is gathered in one fell swoop. So we have filled out by account owner versus if you're not the account owner. Again, some companies are going to have more need for this than others. We had a fairly high need. We had a lot of folks filling out the affiliate application who were not the primary business owner. What is your role? The account owner first name, et cetera. So just a whole bunch of information we collect. Well, we wanted to know if we're going to be paying them as an individual or as a company. Account validation. Here come the hoops. We want their website URL. We want their, we want their Facebook information. If they click yes, please enter your profile. If they click yes to this, we want to know who the faculty is that they're coming in interested in promoting. We want to know about their anticipated frequency. We want to know how they're promote. So again, didn't want to burn all this information up in custom fields and keep. So Gravity Forms really serves as well. Then we want them to wax poetic. Tell us why you want to be a partner. And we read that pretty carefully. It's definitely an important part of our approval process. Then, you know, IRSE stuff information, everybody's favorite.

[35:02] Micah: Everyone is paid through PayPal, which just keeps everything so much cleaner and easier for

[35:09] Mary Kay: a lot of reasons. There is an affiliate agreement. I have read and agree. And then they submit the application. And then that goes into, obviously, we fire a campaign and keep that notifies my team member who then comes and reviews this. If she's got any questions on it, she'll sometimes ask me. We approve or disprove. And then forward they go. Or not.

[35:36] Micah: Very cool. So you're saying some of this information is real.

[35:40] Mary Kay: And then part of this whole thing is just most scammers aren't going to go through this effort.

[35:44] Micah: They know you're going to check them out. So they just won't bother, right?

[35:47] Mary Kay: Or they're going to give us garbage information. For a while, it was interesting. We had a, and fortunately, we had these gates in place. But we had probably, this was maybe six or eight months ago. We had about 12 people who came in all at the same time, all wanting or all saying they were here to promote a particular summit. So that all sort of just seemed legit. But then when we got into like, show us your Facebook profile or business page, what they put on there when we went and reviewed that Facebook page, it just reeked of scam. And so we, none of those, and then we kind of caught on to the pattern pretty quickly. After we had two or three of them come in in a fairly short period of time, it was like, oh, here's another one. Oh, and here's another one. And so we just disproved them.

[36:37] Micah: And when we disprove, we, this may sound a little harsh.

[36:42] Mary Kay: We used to send them a nice little note that said, sorry, you know, not right now. And then it was, you'd always get inundated with the pushback and especially scammers.

[36:50] Micah: They're, they want in.

[36:53] Mary Kay: And so we, now we don't do anything. We just disproved them.

[36:58] Micah: I was going to ask kind of what those responses are. That's interesting that you found just don't even, yeah, just leave it alone.

[37:06] Mary Kay: Yeah.

[37:07] Micah: Cool, cool. So anything else come to mind on this affiliate front that you want to share?

[37:15] Mary Kay: You know, sometimes one of the complaints I can sometimes hear about the keep affiliate portal process is, oh, you know, and people wanting to go to other systems. Depending upon what your particular needs are, I actually, after 14 years and running now up to eight figures a year of sales through the affiliate program, even though there are definitely some things that I would like to shift or adjust in terms of the keep affiliate program, it is really, really solid. And so if you are a max classic user or you're considering becoming one or keep ultimate, I'm not even sure if keep pro has it, but for sure, max classic and ultimate. I would recommend leaning in. If you're looking at some other options for that. But if you, but if you in particular have a lead driven program, which is what this program is absolutely lead driven. Affiliates do not ever send direct to a sales page for this. They always send into some type of a funnel that has a free opt in at the beginning, whether it's a scheduled event, a recorded event. There's something that the affiliate is going to send their audience to that only requires name and email registration.

[38:40] Micah: And that has played really, really well for this company, again, for 16, 17 years.

[38:49] Mary Kay: I've been at it for 14, but they've been they've been doing it for a little bit longer than I've been on the team. So it works if that's the type, if that's your model. It works really, really well. And of course, you can also do direct to sales page because you can set up a tracking link to go anywhere you choose. You don't have to go through a lead generation. But when you do rely on lead generation as a first step, if you if you want your affiliates or partners to promote into a funnel structure, it really is. It's a great choice. It's a great choice.

[39:23] Micah: Gotcha. All right. Well, let's let's wrap up this affiliate thing for a moment. And I'll just say for you that anybody watching this, listening to this, whatever, if you are using keep and you're interested in this, I would reach out to Mary Kay and talk to her about it because it is a unique affiliate program. And and kind of like she said, though. It's proven itself over time. I mean, I've used it and paid out stuff for a long time now and for a lot of clients. And it's been interesting that even though it hasn't really changed in that time period, it still essentially works. And so like you did here, if you wrap memberium around it, then you can make it look however you'd like, you know, looks up to date as your images and as you want it to. But then the core functionality behind it, like you're saying, is solid. And I've known a lot of people who've had complaints about it and have have tried different things, but they always end up coming back because it's it's all integrated into the same spot. So I'm not sure of the perfect solution if you're not using, you know, keep or, you know, a version of their product that has the affiliate program. Let's say I know there are other solutions. I'm just saying it's it's one of the best that I've personally worked with. And again, you're showing a great example of it over a long period of time. Mary Kay, before we go, let's check out one more nerdy little detail. So if you're not a nerd, you don't have to watch this. You can just, you know, hire Mary Kay. But if you do want to see some of the back end stuff, let's go look at how some of these links are created. I also want to ask about how you use auto login links.

[41:01] Mary Kay: And that's something that anybody could use.

[41:04] Micah: You know, the use of auto login links for affiliates in this case makes a lot of sense. So, yeah, let's let's dive into the nerdy details for a minute.

[41:12] Mary Kay: Get into the geek zone. All right. So we are now on our admin view. So let's go hit the dashboard. And you'll see it's a very simple structure on the back end. Everything, as I noted previously, it's just a good old standard WordPress post. And as previously mentioned a couple of minutes ago, we have different types of affiliates or different types of partners. And so because they're different, they're showing up for a different reason. They're showing up in a different way. And so we manage them uniquely. And when we are working with what I would call some of our most important, for lack of a better word, our busiest folks, like our faculty, for example, and we need to send them access to their materials. We don't want we don't want to say, hey, go log in and go get it. We want to send them right to that location or summit speakers, for example. If anybody listening has ever done or does summit as part of their list building and growth initiatives, you know that that is just an absolute exercise in herding cats. It is can be really, really, really challenging. And so one of the things that we have done is we make heavy use of auto login links. I'm going to show you in just a second here how we structure links in such a way that we get really granular tracking for a summit speaker, for example. And then what we're going to do is let's say I have a summit. Let's say that summit has 30 speakers. I'm going to send all of them access to their materials in one email broadcast. The summit speakers all have a special access tag that allows them to see the summit speaker page, which we're going to see in just a second. And of course, the URL of that page is what we've utilized in the auto login link.

[43:15] Micah: And if you're not familiar with auto login links, they are going to be found in your memoriam settings.

[43:26] Mary Kay: And they are right here. And so what you would do is you would just simply copy this. And then where it says your page, you're going to drop the actual slug of the page or post in our case to take someone reading that email directly to that page.

[43:44] Micah: And then once they're there, let's go find a speaker. While you're looking for that, I'll tell people that an auto login link can be sent to somebody by email. And you can also auto login from order forms and forms. So if somebody fills out a form, they can be auto logged into the site or they can fill out a form, get an email, click a link and be auto logged into the site. And what Mary Kay was pointing out is not only can they be logged in, they can be logged in and then sent to a specific page. So that really helps, you know, not having to explain where to go, but just simply click here. It'll take you. It'll log you right in and take you right to it.

[44:22] Mary Kay: It'll take you right to it. And, you know, trying to get speakers to promote is, again, it's a herding cat exercise. They don't really like to do that. And so I want to make it as easy as possible. So here you can see some of the functionality we have built in. Here's that special tag that I made note of right here. So this tag would only be applied to speakers for that particular summit. And then here's our swipe copy. So we're just going to go in through the dashboard level here. And my screen may not be big enough. Let me know if I need to blow this up, Micah.

[45:04] Micah: Yeah, you could zoom it. And just so people understand, we are logged into the back end as an administrator.

[45:09] Mary Kay: So she's looking, you know, as an admin at some of this. Yeah. Oh, there we go. I think it's hopefully that's big enough now. All right. So here you can see this is actually a customized structure for what is coming off of Keep as the affiliate redirect. And so if that term isn't familiar to you, what happens is in Keep is I create an affiliate redirect to go to a certain page. And the affiliate redirect contains the essential tracking code. And this piece of tracking code is the actual page code. And then this piece of code, we have actually on the back end of Keep, we have created a unique redirect structure. So that allows us when we would export results for our referral redirects for this particular summit. I'm going to see individualized results for every single speaker because I've double coded them both to the page as well as to their individualized redirect link.

[46:19] Micah: And then this part right here is the actual piece of the code that tracks.

[46:26] Mary Kay: This is the piece that would assign a contact coming in, for example, to that particular referral partner. And then if that contact ultimately purchases the upgrade package, for example, it would then assign the commission to them as well. So we're utilizing memberium coding embedded into a highly specialized affiliate redirect that gives us the functionality that we need without a whole lot of extra pulling of reports would be the only other way to do this. And it's kind of cross-reference and do all kinds of crazy things. This allows us, because we have the memberium coding, this allows us to do it in one fell swoop. And then the auto login link gets them there immediately.

[47:18] Micah: Hmm. That is getting a little bit fancy, isn't it? So you're saying, and this is only for the Infusionsoft maybe true nerds, where you are embedding an affiliate code into the link tracker and then creating a new link for every single affiliate. That's really funny. All right. So you'll have to follow up with Mary Kay if you want to do something like that. That's cool. So I'm guessing a lot of these, when we talk about the auto login link, you showed it in the back end of memberium as far as like where I go as an admin to grab that link. But then you go and you put that, let's say, in a keep email, and it merges in that person's email address and ID and all the pieces into the link to allow it to authenticate them on the way in. It's kind of nifty. I think people should understand everything that we've been talking about. I'm trying to think if there's any other detail of this to connect the dots. So we showed how they sign up. They come on through. They get their resources. They send it out, their customer purchases. I guess one thing you said earlier when you were saying that this business is lead-driven. We should point out that, yeah, you are able through the keep settings to determine who should get the credit when a sale happens. You know, if multiple people tried to send the same person in, who gets the credit and so on. So there are some really cool, I think, granular tracking there, especially for how long ago it was made. Mary Kay, this has been awesome to show something besides membership. In a way, it's a membership, right? It's an affiliate membership, but they're not paying for content. They're not really accessing content in here necessarily. They're really just coming in to understand the offer, how they should promote it, grabbing their link, and doing it in order to make themselves money, to make the company money. It's awesome. Any last comments on using Membarium for an affiliate portal?

[49:23] Mary Kay: Other than do it? Other than do it? It just makes, it really makes the program flow. Again, whether you're looking at just a small customer referring friends and family into what you're doing, or something as robust and as high volume as what the Shift Network does, it works. It's a great way to grow and expand your business. You bring in very high quality leads. People love to get paid an affiliate commission, even if it's not even a huge amount. It's always, yay, celebration. Oh, look at that. How fantastic. So it really is nothing but a win-win for your business. And you can do it in such a way when you lean into the tools and just think a little creatively about it, and employ a Membarium portal and all of that functionality that we get to really fine-tune the experience. Like you can create just a great little, you know, partner program, no matter what you choose to call it.

[50:28] Micah: Yeah, and I think anybody trying to sell a course or a membership or a coaching program or live summits, any of the things we've talked about, even probably any product, but especially those products, should have a referral partner program and should be, you know, constantly working on it to make it better. Well, Mary Kay, thank you so much for joining us. Those of you watching, check under the video for a link to Mary Kay, but it is Mary Kay at Convert More Consulting. And we have a few other podcasts with her. We'll link them under here as well. Thanks again, Mary Kay.

[51:02] Mary Kay: Thanks, Micah.