How to Generate Affiliate Income

Mike Hambright (00:01.177)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I am interviewing my good friend, Mr. Frank Chen. Look how friendly he is waving there. But we’re talking about, Frank is kind of a master, helps a lot of people with affiliate programs, affiliate revenue. And we’re to be talking about how to generate affiliate revenue in your business, whether you’re just getting started to your veteran real estate investor or maybe you’re, I don’t think most people listening to the show are not a real estate investor at all, but you don’t necessarily have to be a real estate investor to generate affiliate income. But a lot of Frank’s business and focus has historically been on the.

Frank Chen (00:27.47)
That’s right.

Mike Hambright (00:30.839)
state industry. how’s that for an introduction? Frank, how are you, buddy?

Frank Chen (00:34.626)
I’m feeling great man. I’ve been looking forward to this this call for quite some time. I love what you built and we’ve done some business together and I’m happy to kind of dive into what I’ve been working on. So thanks for having me today.

Mike Hambright (00:41.549)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (00:44.889)
That’s great. Yeah, I think, you know, there’s been some themes like in this economy, in this market, I think of a few things that are kind of going on in the industry. But I think one of the themes is like multiple streams of income. Like people are just looking for more ways to generate income because it’s been a bumpy road for some people the past couple of years and folks are always looking for a way to generate some additional income. And so I think this will be interesting for folks that are listening.

Frank Chen (00:58.829)
Yeah.

Frank Chen (01:11.178)
Absolutely. Yeah. I’m excited to kind of tell you guys how I got started in this business and why I feel like this is really possible for anyone, regardless of again, your experience level, how long you’ve been doing real estate, a lot of applications. So what we’re talking about today, so really excited to dive in.

Mike Hambright (01:24.749)
Yeah. So before we jump in, tell us a little bit more about your background and your history, Frank.

Frank Chen (01:29.676)
Yeah, I love sharing the story just because people are like, well, you you must have had a long history of real estate, you know, internet marketing and all. No, no, no. I grew up at a home where my parents were immigrant, you know, Chinese immigrants. came here cleaning apartments and things like that, working these hourly jobs. They got into real estate. They got me involved. So was fixing up houses and plumbing and electrical work when I was in high school. So I highly recommend all the parents out there, whether your kids are kicking and screaming, drag them in because I’m so grateful now that I can.

fix anything in my house without having to call an expensive contractor. So that’s great. I did attend a university of Texas in Austin. So go Longhorns looking forward to the football season. But most importantly is I graduated with a nutrition degree, zero marketing background, zero advertising. I couldn’t tell you how many calories are in an apple, what nutrients are in your pasta. Can’t help you with that. But I found this job after graduating because I realized I can make 35, 40,000, $45,000 as an undergrad.

Or I could take a leap of faith and I found this job on Craigslist, believe it or not. And it was a small company called REIClub.com where I found my first mentor and guide. And I really appreciate everything he’s done for me. Shout out to him if you’re out there watching. And I really learned my chops in this business where we had a mutual friend at the time or a mutual acquaintance, I should say, which is Jeff Adams at the time. And he was starting this mastermind in Newport Beach. I went there and it was my crash course.

in online sales, like people selling real estate education, home study courses, and they were doing six figures a month, sometimes seven figures a month. That was what we call the golden age of info marketing about 16, 17 years ago. And that’s really where my journey began. I was like, Whoa, this is how people make money outside of working at a eight to five. Okay, this is something. So that’s kind of how I got started in this business.

Mike Hambright (03:21.145)
Yeah, that’s great. And it’s evolved a lot. We’re going to talk about what is affiliate, how to generate affiliate income. Back in the day, back in those days, it was mostly courses, mostly courses. But now it’s software and all sorts of other products and maybe still some courses as well. I think there’s been a real, I guess, maturing of the industry in terms of tech and things that are out there. And there’s virtual assistant services and there’s all sorts of.

really probably a lot more services than products, would say, than historically, right?

Frank Chen (03:54.734)
Yeah, you said it perfectly. think one of the brands that people always reference when starting in real estate is Carlton sheets, right? I think back in the day you bought like a binder and there was like a couple of CDs in there and people selling this for a thousand bucks before you said via teleseminars. It still amazes me where people would sit on a phone like a dialer, push a number, sit there, hear someone talk for 60 minutes and then buy. wasn’t a webinar. It wasn’t a presentation that you don’t see anybody. You’re literally just listening to an infomercial.

Mike Hambright (04:18.948)
Yeah.

Frank Chen (04:22.904)
an educational infomercial and you’re like, yeah, this makes sense. I’ll pull out my credit card. And now we’ve evolved today to where, right, you’re right. So there’s a lot more services where we’re leaning more in on our end users, right? Before it was like, I want to learn how to do this. Now people are like, well, I need the tools to really help me do this much faster. And that’s where we’re seeing the shift now.

Mike Hambright (04:40.889)
Yeah. Yep, yep. So let’s kind of clarify. What is an affiliate program? Like what is affiliate revenue? Like what is that? Talk about it a bit.

Frank Chen (04:50.83)
Yeah, thanks for asking. Yeah. One of the things I love to do is break down the misconceptions of affiliate marketing. I think most people’s understanding of it is, yeah, it’s Amazon, right? I watch my favorite influencer say, oh, Lincoln bio or hey, my shopping carts in the comments and you go there and you click and it’s all these products. Well, the reality of that is you’re only making probably 5 % 3 to 5 % of these products, right? So you sell a hundred dollar thing. You make five bucks. You got to sell a lot of those guys to make some, you know, any kind of side income doing that. You know, there’s

other things are in should call click bank or these kind of marketplaces where you can find products and typically those are like lower price point in our industry low price plans like you know anything between seven bucks to say like five hundred dollars still earning like five or ten percent on those things not very exciting so I like to tell people there are tons of brands out there that are one give you a lot higher commissions and to they have much bigger price points you don’t need to sell a ton of them you can just sell a handful

and make a comfortable side income living. You could take that vacation you want, take a nice dinner, buy the car, pay the mortgage, whatever you wanna do. But there are tons of partnerships out there and they’re looking for everyday people just like you to work with. So don’t think that you have to have the thousands of subscribers, a big influence. As long as you’re active in the business that you’re in, there’s opportunity for you.

Mike Hambright (06:11.117)
Yeah, that’s great. And a lot of the products that people that are listening right now that use have probably have a referral or an affiliate program. I some of them you just go online and sign up and you don’t have talk to anybody. Some of them you kind of have to know somebody to kind of get your foot in the door and maybe have promotional campaigns and stuff like that,

Frank Chen (06:27.8)
Yeah, it really depends, depending on the affiliate program, you ask what is affiliate program, it’s basically a way for you to partner with a product or service or software that you love, right? And then earn commissions just talking about it, sharing it, being an ambassador of that brand. And that’s really how simple it is. You don’t even have to know that much about it as long as you use it and like it.

that’s enough really to become an affiliate partner for anything that you’re using. And that’s really a great starting point for you is just looking at what are your everyday tools, software, services that you use in your everyday life, you know, and that’s a good, good, good starting place.

Mike Hambright (07:04.301)
Yeah, yeah, it probably gives it the most credibility. think there’s a lot of people that we know that promote products and they’re like, I don’t really want to promote anything that I don’t believe in or I don’t use myself, right? And so if you’re already using it and you’re like, I love this tool, here’s why, and you’re talking about it all the time, the theory is, as well make money rather than just going to product.com. It’s like product.com slash referral equals Frank Chen or something, right?

Frank Chen (07:28.694)
Yeah, you know, it’s an interesting point because a lot of times I ask people like, know, do you refer people and do ever get paid? No, no, no, no, I don’t. I just I love the business. I love, you know, Tom, he’s great over there. I just want to make sure he we send him great business. It’s like you do know that he’d be more than happy to pay you a commission for these referrals because they’re probably spending a ton of money on ads, coal traffic, looking for unqualified leads versus someone who gives them a warm silver. Hey, this person, I’ve already told them everything. They’re ready to get started.

They love those way more. So they’re happy to incentivize you for more of these.

Mike Hambright (07:59.332)
Yeah.

Yeah. And for those folks that have programs, it’s just a marketing expense for them. They could go run Facebook ads or Google ads and maybe they do all that as well, but it’s just basically as a marketing channel ultimately.

Frank Chen (08:06.402)
That is correct.

Frank Chen (08:13.132)
That’s a great way to distill it down 100 % as a it’s an alternative marketing strategy. Yes, sir.

Mike Hambright (08:14.724)
Yeah.

Yeah. So what are some of the misconceptions of like affiliate programs or affiliate marketing?

Frank Chen (08:22.412)
Yeah, you know, I think, you know, one of the things people think is like, like, I don’t think most people have affiliate programs. I would say most do. They’re not probably built out to to scale, but at the very basic level, if you asked anybody, you know, even if it’s on their website or things like that, say, hey, you guys have an affiliate program, there’s a very good chance they’ll either create one on the spot for you or they have one that just not publicly advertising it. Okay.

Number two, as I mentioned briefly earlier, is you don’t have to be a massive influencer, right? You don’t have to have Facebook communities. You don’t have to have a really popular Instagram or whatever it is. You just have to look at your spheres of influence. I use that a lot, right? You you go to a family dinner, you’re at work, you’re, you know, a lot of us entrepreneurs who start with an eight to five or nine to five, nine to five, nine to five is you’re looking to ways to escape that. And we also have that that always comes up in organic conversations with friends.

dinner parties, at business events, things like that. And it always, it always segues to, like, what are you doing and how, who do you use and how did you get started? These are all great lead-ins to an affiliate conversation. Hey, let me, let me share that link that, that where I got started. Let me show you the event that I went to, or let me show the software that I used to set up that now helps me run my leads in my business. You know, these are all entry points to becoming a great affiliate partner. Right? So you don’t, again, don’t have to do

Mike Hambright (09:33.091)
right.

Frank Chen (09:46.156)
big email blast to your, you know, all your followers or have to do these Instagram reels or stories. These are methodologies, but you don’t have to have these in order to be successful.

Mike Hambright (09:56.739)
Yeah, and Frank…

Correct me if I’m wrong. I feel like when when I started a long time ago and when this industry was first kind of coming up the kind of influencer industry feel let’s say the affiliate industry is There are a lot of people that they didn’t have their own products They just built lists and they their whole business was referring to other people now. What’s a lot more common is the masses of filling filling, you know, I Have affiliate links to share some things here and there so said another way People should think about like what is your strategy?

to build a whole business around becoming an affiliate marketer, if you will. There’s not a whole lot of those in it. And there’s not as many as it used to be, I don’t think. Or there’s people that are like, hey, I just want supplemental income. Or if I refer three or four five people to this, I get my product for free. It’s kind of like more of a mass-type product now, or a mass-type model than it used to be,

Frank Chen (10:50.03)
Yeah, like it’s like pick your poison, just like real estate. can’t do, you know, if you’re getting started, you can’t be a wholesaler, invest in commercial real estate and, you know, do a lot of creative finance deals all at the same time. If you’re getting started, you have to really focus it on one thing, get really good at it, build a process and systems and move on. That’s exactly the same with affiliates. Like you’re going to see a lot of parallels today, uh, with regards to running a sales team or a real estate business, all those concepts apply to building an affiliate program.

And you said exactly right. It’s it’s what what do you want to do? Are you good at marketing? Right. You don’t want to come out with a product is that that creates its own timeline. Right. Coming up with a webinar, your offer stack, you know, what are you going to sell? How are you going to fulfill? What is your ascension model? Like a graduating people from a low price point to your high ticket. There’s a lot that goes into that. And then then wrapping an affiliate program around all of it. Right. Versus just really becoming a portal back in the day. Like you said, REI Club was a great blog.

article, organic SEO rich. So we grew a list without having our own product. We literally sold other real estate resources to our community of people who just said, hey, I’m interested in real estate, right? So if you’re really good at kind of aggregating that type of community, then you could just promote products and make a great living that way. Or if you’re going down the path, you’ve been doing the business, you you’ve done, now you want to teach, there’s a path for you as well.

Mike Hambright (12:12.911)
Yeah, that’s great. if folks want to start, how do they start? mean, it’s not hard, right? So how do they kind of make a decision of like, what are some things I could promote? it products they’re already using or people that they respect in the industry or like, where do they kind of get started on knowing what they should promote?

Frank Chen (12:29.538)
Yeah. Great question. Yeah. So let’s say one on one. I would first look at your current product services and software you’re using. Right. If you attended a coaching program or a live event of sorts and it really did impact your life in a positive way. Reach out to that brand and be like hey I have some friends I want to talk to about this. Can I get set up with an affiliate link. You’re going to get two responses. What’s that. Or yeah sure. Right. The ones I say yeah sure work with them. Stick with that. But that really starts your first step into affiliate marketing.

Right. And I really distill it down to referral marketing. Right. Just talking about it with people and then giving out your link for those who are kind of more established doing, you know, more deals and are maybe on the path of creating an info brand. Then it’s more about stacking because your job at that point is trying to find buyers of your product. Right. But guess what? All of your buyers. I mean, it’s identified as your zero to one is one who’s wanting to get started in real estate. You’re one of five who are starting to build out the processes and kind of building an actual business.

Then you have your five plus a month deal people who are like, okay, I got the systems. Now I’m looking to do scale. Every one of these avatars needs different services and tools to run their business. So for you and that type of business is to look for those relationships. Start again, back to basics is start with the things that you’re already using and then build that into their, their kind of onboarding or their journey inside your sales slash education ecosystem. Right.

Because the idea here is you’re spending a lot of money on the front and trying to drive that customer. The second thing you can do now is, okay, well, unless they don’t buy my stuff or if they buy my stuff, there’s a cap to how much we can make by layering in or what I call affiliate stacking. You can now diversify your revenue. And what’s really exciting about it, it starts offsetting, you know, your front end ad spend. It starts covering potentially your overhead, any expenses that are kind of impacting your business. Affiliate marketing is kind of your icing on the cake to help alleviate some of those pressures.

Right. So your students are always going to ask you, hey, you know, know, Mike, what are you using to, you know, you know, cost seg your deals or hey, Mike, what are you using to find your properties or manage your deals? Don’t be the guy who just refers and doesn’t get paid. That’s if I could have you guys leave with one thing today. Don’t keep referring things without getting paid.

Mike Hambright (14:24.655)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (14:44.451)
Yeah, it’s kind of funny because we have referral programs and things like that. I want to pay people like as I know that when you get paid, you want to do it again. Like I appreciate people like, I just I don’t expect anything. I I appreciate that. But I want to like I want to pay you because I want to I want you to go do that again. Right. And I just feel like people people like money. People like getting paid.

Frank Chen (15:05.698)
Money is yeah, it’s a yeah right. Money is a powerful incentive and that’s it right. I always joke of my little joke of my clients like well Frank how long should our program work. It’s like a one month three months like I’ve never seen a single person complain about receiving a check eight months later right. Like you sent him a lead six months ago and they bought something six months later and you sent him a check. Guess what you just re-engage that person because like my God this is awesome. Let me let me keep I forgot I totally forgot about this. Let me go refer you some more people.

So money is never a bad thing when it comes to incentivizing your people.

Mike Hambright (15:38.415)
Yeah, that’s great. And it helps with the relationship too. It’s like people, you know, people, it’s good tool to, not that you should have to pay your friends to be your friends, you know, it’s the language of business is getting paid.

Frank Chen (15:42.22)
It does. It really, really does.

Frank Chen (15:54.648)
Yeah, I don’t know how you feel about this, Mike. I’m curious. We’ll just take a quick little pause here. It’s like when I go to a friend’s restaurant or like, I want to support through business. They’re always like, no, you don’t have to pay. And it’s like, no, no, no, you’re in business. I want, this is how I can support. If I come here and eat for free, I’m not supporting you. I’m just eating your food. So it’s kind of like, that’s always been my mindset of like, if I’m going to bring you business, you’re obviously going to be making money. Let’s, let’s make money together. Let’s make money together.

Mike Hambright (16:01.347)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (16:07.267)
Yeah, right, that’s right.

Mike Hambright (16:18.765)
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. are some best practices that you’ve seen for folks that are in the affiliate business or that are affiliates?

Frank Chen (16:26.126)
Yeah, you I always, you know, one of the things that people don’t really know as a whole with affiliate programs or just affiliate marketing is that it’s honestly an imperfect, it’s an imperfect system. Okay. What I mean by that is the only way you get paid is if things track properly. Okay. And what I mean by imperfect is any software out there, and Mike, we’re just talking about this other, like, oh, just a few hours ago is just like nothing tracks a hundred percent. Nothing works perfectly. So it does require

attention to these details. So if you are going to be referring, you know, clients or opportunities to brands to get paid on, just make sure you’re tracking this on your own as well. You can’t you got to trust but verify, right? I know a lot of people in our industry who work with big, big brands and as long as they’re getting a check in the mail, they never ask, well, is this like, is this everything? Because if the check is big enough, they’re like, oh, this is good. But instead of 10,000, what if it could have been 15,000, right? But the fact they got a $10,000 check, they’re like, dude,

I’m happy. I don’t care if you missed anything and I always have been a big I’m bullish on what I could have made not what I did make because that kind of mindset is gonna make sure you pay attention to the details you put systems in place because again, these are your hard-earned leads. These are your relationships. You should get paid on them, right? So you just got to keep a close eye when you’re working with partners that you know, you have a system in place there are

Fail safes you can do with softwares like Google Analytics, Wicked Reports, UTM tracking codes. I know I’m using some verbiage. Hopefully your listening can just Google or ask chat GPT. But the idea here is there’s plenty of things you can do to protect yourself when working with certain partners, right? So I’ll probably say that is the biggest, most important thing right now.

Mike Hambright (18:11.043)
Yeah, and sometimes it’s finding partners that have a high level of attention to detail, right, that you know are looking out for you. For example, we have a referral program for most of my businesses and we have tracking links too, so we track, but sometimes people will come in and…

get something for free, like a lead magnet, something that we give away for free, that we track that affiliate, who sent them there, and then later they buy, but when they buy they use a different email address. So like you can’t track that back. So what we do is we say, hey, this person used a new email, when they bought they bought a new, they used a new email address. well, we know that they did, and then if they go through a salesperson, for example, because most of our stuff is high ticket.

Frank Chen (18:37.966)
That’s right.

Mike Hambright (18:52.599)
We know that that person didn’t just come to our site and buy. There’s history there. So let’s go find out what other email addresses that name is under or whatever. We kind of back into, and if we have to, we go listen to the sales call and say, who referred this person? Because we always ask on the sales call. Because we want to honor the people that send us business. We want to make sure that nobody ever says, hey, I never got paid on this person I sent to you. We want to try to prevent that from ever happening.

Frank Chen (19:10.222)
That’s right.

Frank Chen (19:18.22)
Yeah, and that’s what I got pro tip for y’all is if you’re creating like landing page forums or intake forums, one of the things we started including on everything in the past year, which has been massively helpful is adding a simple feed is who can we thank for referring you? Right. Have a drop down menu, a place they can type. It’s just a fail safe for you. And of course, adding an SOP with your sales team of asking like, Hey, who can we thank for referring? Like literally just asking that question really helps you kind of, and honestly, it helps you build a profile of if you’re not paying anybody yet.

Mike Hambright (19:40.301)
Yeah.

Frank Chen (19:45.336)
Who are all the people referring us business? How can we formalize a relationship there? So now it’s more consistent. You know, we’re running special promotions with them. We’re doing, you know, a little bit more strategic planning to kind of slowly grow that referral base. Right. One thing I definitely wanted to cover is what should you do is ask any company what are your payouts? You know, like how like if it’s a software, what are your churn rates? Right. Because you don’t want to just refer someone who buys a software and then cancels after a month.

Mike Hambright (19:51.171)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (19:59.263)
All Yep.

Frank Chen (20:14.41)
You want to sure you’re working with a company that has processes in place to retain your leads. You can keep getting paid every month. Right. So asking better questions and not being afraid to do that. Again, they need your business. They want your business. So it’s important that you pre-qualify who you get in bed with per se. Right. So yeah, it’s important you do that.

Mike Hambright (20:33.507)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. What are some other kind of systems and processes?

to really treat this like a business. it’s really easy. A lot of folks listening to this could go say, hey, I use this tool and that tool, go to their website, in the footer, they’re like, want to become an affiliate? Click here. You can create a link in seconds, right? But you don’t do anything with that. So I’ve kind of found in the past, we don’t really create affiliate links for anybody anymore unless we talk to them and we know they’re going to promote it. Because it doesn’t take us anything to create affiliate links, but it does take effort on their part to actually promote it. And what’s the point if they’re not going to

do it. So like what are some systems and processes for folks to consider to have to treat it like a business ultimately?

Frank Chen (21:16.546)
Yeah, I love that. And honestly, we’re in a really amazing time of AI. We’ve been diving into that so much deeper these last couple of months. And even if you have zero background of how to promote an affiliate link or how to position it within your social media or an email to a friend, AI can now really help support you there. It can really help encapsulate your voice, your approach, make it more persuasive, however you want to design the prompt.

You can now just take your affiliate link and then add that as a parameter. OK. But I always tell people it’s consisting. It’s like this the analogy of a snowball. OK. If you don’t start today you’re not going to be able to build up that momentum because I like marketing you know depending on if you’re already really big then you do a promotion you’ll get like a nice pop of sales. But we try to do is how do we find a process that creates sustainable you know flatten the curve so it’s not like a roller coaster. It’s how do we create consistency.

And the idea here is finding a schedule that makes that works for you. Right. If you want to talk about it weekly monthly in your LinkedIn account or your social media accounts. Great. Create a schedule for that. If you’re like I don’t have time for that hire a VA created S.O.P. show them how to create these posts and then just using your affiliate link. Right. The other side of it too is taking a look more about your internal onboarding processes. Right.

I kind of analyze one brand that’s doing, think, close to 10 million this year as an education coaching brand, and they make it mandatory. So when you sign up, you have to get this software. You have to do this. You have to do this. This is your onboarding. And until you do these things, you can’t get to step two, because on step two, we’re going to go through these things. So there’s stickiness there, right? So that’s ways you can start building that into your education program. Or if you’re just on the side of marketing and I just want to start generating revenue.

You got to talk about it, right? So be consistent. And I think in sales and you probably know this better than I do, Mike, it’s like what five or eight touch points before someone’s like, yeah, like they just heard it differently and now they want to buy. That’s the exact same thing with affiliates is they have to know what you what you’re working with, who you’re partnered with, the problems that you’re solving. And over time, people will self select.

Mike Hambright (23:25.592)
Right.

Mike Hambright (23:35.715)
Yeah.

Yeah, think for one way for people to do this, if you’re not like a quote info marketer, which we’ll talk about info marketers, how to become one, if that’s what you want to do, is almost like have a toolbox. Like, hey, these are my recommended tools that we use in our business. And just on your website or on social media, have a link that just goes to a page where like, these are our top 10 tools or something. It doesn’t have to be a week long product launch for how to get this CRM or what. It doesn’t have to be, right? One easy way is just to have,

Here’s all the stuff that I recommend that we use in our business and I recommend you do it too.

Frank Chen (24:09.87)
Yeah, like so something as simple as hey, here are the top three tools I use to close my last 40 K deal. You know, people like what did you use? know, like, yeah, it’s software of this data company and this cold collar company. Cool. Awesome. And then those are all your affiliate links. So again, it’s it’s we I think people tend to over complicate, you know, how to be a marketer. And I always try to like snap them back. It’s like if you’re in the business, what you’re doing every day is marketing material.

All you have to do now is just document it, right? If you have a closing contract or, hey, this VA that I hired helped me talk to a seller off of a ledge and was able to warm them up for me to close. Like, here’s the company that I use for that VA, right? Like anything that’s happening in your business, especially if you’re doing multiple deals, I promise you have more things going on than you can even possibly use as marketing material. Right. So you don’t have to get super creative and become a master marketer. It’s just tap into what you’re already doing.

Mike Hambright (24:37.871)
That’s right.

Mike Hambright (24:52.131)
Yep.

Mike Hambright (25:00.857)
Yep.

Mike Hambright (25:07.055)
Yeah, and even for folks that are listeners that are a real estate investor, there’s a lot of ways to make referrals from a real estate investing business. We’re talking about kind of info products here for the most part, but I just did a show here yesterday that we recorded that.

we were talking about how they were, they’re licensed and they refer people to other agents and they, you know, they have referral programs where they make money on their deal. Sometimes they refer them to other contractors that can help with stuff and the contractor, you know, either pays them or they’re getting some favoritism towards the next time they use them or a discount or whatever. So there’s a lot of ways to make money. It doesn’t have to be that kind of quote info marketing, right?

Frank Chen (25:36.419)
Yeah.

Frank Chen (25:41.354)
No, and I had a really interesting conversation with an up and coming influencer. I won’t drop his name here, but he kind of opened my eyes to another. He was thinking much, much bigger. He has a community that’s paying, I think, $199 a month. He has coaching programs and things like that. He’s like, what kind of affiliate relationships? thought he was like softwares and data and things. He’s like, no, no, no, I’m trying to get with Keller. I’m trying to get with Sherman Williams, paint companies, roofing companies, national companies to create cheaper quotes for his community.

So if you’re out there as a newer contractor, you know, going to Google reviews slash Yelp reviews, you’re to get pretty big quotes on your rehab jobs, right? Paint, roof, AC. But if you’re say you’re now in a mastermind where you’re the guy, the leader of the group has affiliate relationships with national painting companies, national roofing companies that give you 20 % off. So imagine, Hey, I just got a quote for 20 K to do this job, to do my redo my kitchen. He’s like,

OK, well, have a cabinet person all this just happened to our resources and immediately drops your quote down to like 17000 16000 like immediate and then he gets to a percentage of that of that project as an affiliate partner. Right. That’s really, really cool. So these are how you start thinking outside the box and how affiliate marketing or referral marketing really expands beyond what we talked about earlier, like, you know, Amazon and stuff like that.

Mike Hambright (26:44.207)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (26:50.777)
Yeah, yeah, that’s Yeah.

Mike Hambright (27:02.233)
Yep, yep.

So let’s talk a little bit about kind of people that are in the info space. think I want to say this for folks that are real estate investors and they’re like, you know, things are kind of getting hard. Maybe I should just be a coach. And it’s like, that’s hard. Like people don’t realize how hard it is to be, to get into kind of the info space. Like, especially if you’re starting a software or almost anything you’re doing, it’s always harder than what people think. And the grass isn’t always greener, but there are a lot of people that, you know, tend to find their way. I’m the same way. I obviously have flipped hundreds of houses and started doing coaching and all sorts of other things.

Frank Chen (27:14.722)
Yeah, yeah, Sure.

Mike Hambright (27:33.209)
and kind of found my way there. But for folks to kind of get into the info space in this market, like the current kind of era, like what are some ways to kind of get in and at least get started, would you say?

Frank Chen (27:45.644)
Yeah I know we’re really living in an age of just information overload right like how to start an info brand you know we’ll follow Alex Hermosie we’re looking like Russell Brunt like all these guys have had to create funnels and laying pages let me just distill this down for everybody okay. Everything that people are saying out there takes a massive amount of time if you want to create a webinar it’s not as easy to sing chat GPT create me a webinar right. I wish it was that easy. There’s a lot of sales psychology and I think you know we’re in a mastermind together Mike and I was remember someone saying like you know what.

In today’s era versus before is that people aren’t becoming a master of their craft. Okay. They are paying agencies to solve certain problems without knowing the why. And if you’re going to get into the info business, you have to understand there’s a lot of sales training and marketing training that you need to know. Otherwise it’s incredibly expensive y’all. It is incredibly expensive. So the idea here is, is this a hobby or is this going to be a business? Let me clearly define that. If it’s a hobby, you want to do a coaching program. You know, you have like one or two friends who want to learn from you. Great.

That’s a hobby. Teach those two people. If you really want to start building a business around this, you have to start thinking from who is our general audience. Okay. And in most cases, you’re going to define it as a newbie or an experienced person. Okay. And these people like, I only want to work with experienced people and my product is very expensive. That’s great. Right. But then you’re it’s going to require a high level of marketing and sales to capture that opportunity. Okay. I wish we could all just close a 15 K sale. No problem. Just by sending out an email.

That’d be great. But the other side of it is building and indoctrinating a community, a business, a relationship with your leads. Okay, so you want to come out with a course that takes time to build, but I definitely recommend, you know, reaching out to those who have done it before. If you’re wanting to learn, funnel hack it, sell someone else’s stuff. If you’re receiving all these, you know, I know you’re receiving all the emails out there, all the spam, all these things, just click on one of them.

One of the things my mentor told me years ago was join as many lists as possible. Join as many newsletter, join them all because as they promote things, promote people, promote products, all you have to do is participate, attend that webinar. You know, if it’s a $97 thing, put that up as a cost of education. Buy that thing, go through it. If you didn’t like it, what didn’t you like about it? And this is going to start giving you the elements of putting together a product you can get behind. You’re proud of it does what it says it does.

Frank Chen (30:09.614)
because we talked about it earlier, you got to stand behind products you love and then include your own because that’s create sustainability. Okay. If you’re just going here for the quick cash grab and all that to each its own, but I highly, highly do not recommend that. You know, Mike and I’ve been around for a while and you can probably attest to this Mike is how many people that started, you know, 15 year olds are still here today. Right. And those are the people who chased after the shiny object. They create a quick product that was very like a flash in the pan.

Mike Hambright (30:31.341)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Frank Chen (30:38.946)
didn’t put the process and systems in place. as soon as advertising costs change or interest rates change inventory mark, because info is honestly directly correlated to the real estate market, believe it or not. Right. So if an investor confidence is low, why do you think they would buy products to buy the thing where their confidence is low? So there are adjustments that you have to make along the way to pivot. Right. Covid was a big, big eye opener for a lot of people who are doing virtual and live events. I want to do a local event at my place.

Mike Hambright (30:57.283)
Right, yeah.

Frank Chen (31:07.47)
Have you ever considered if you can’t do those? Well, your business literally ends in a night, right? So what are you doing to hedge against your ideas? So like anything you’re about to start, it’s really good to project plan and kind of at least forecast three to six months ahead, not just buy a website, create a product and start asking your friends to promote it. That does not work. OK, that is a that does not work. Just take my word for it. But this is what we do as a business, too, is we help clients help navigate that space.

Mike Hambright (31:32.025)
Yeah.

Frank Chen (31:36.812)
because you’re going to be told, yeah, let me set up your websites. Let me set up your automation campaigns. I’ll build out your webinar. I’ll set up all your order pages and all these things. It’s going to cost you 25K. And they hand this all over to you you’re like, well, where am going to get my leads from? You’re like, well, you got to pay for them. Well, that’s ads. You know how much ads cost? You know how long it takes to figure out ads? So there’s a lot of these things I want people to see is like there’s a building block process to this. If you do it correctly, you will end up with a great business, really helping a lot of people.

Mike Hambright (31:51.663)
Exactly.

Mike Hambright (32:06.575)
That’s great, that’s great. Frank, we could talk about this so much more. I know you help people learn about affiliate relationships and you help a lot of bigger brands bring on affiliates and things like that. If folks want to learn kind of more about you and what you’ve got working, where can they go?

Mike Hambright (32:25.084)
You’re muted, Frank.

You’re muted out, Frank.

Frank Chen (32:36.63)
Oops, sorry, my mic was muted. Yeah, my bad. So yeah, theaffiliateincubator.com is my website that can give you some insights to what we do, where I really invite people to come check out as our free Facebook group. It’s private, but we actually do weekly calls in there where I kind of go over strategies, best practices, conversion rates, marketing, all the things we talked about today. I give away for free in my group, right? If you want more one-on-one help, we can do that as well. But our YouTube channel as well, we release content all the time on affiliate programs, best practices,

Mike Hambright (32:37.517)
Yeah, say that again, you’re gooding yourself out.

Frank Chen (33:06.316)
what you should be doing when you come up with a program, creating webinars, whatever it is, all encompassing surrounding your products is what we cover. So we are a affiliate consulting company, but we also help with marketing strategies as well. So lot we do there.

Mike Hambright (33:18.499)
Yeah. Frank, what’s the name of your channel and your Facebook group? It’s all under the same… Okay.

Frank Chen (33:22.636)
It’s all under the affiliate incubator. Yep. If you look up the affiliate on YouTube, you’ll find us my website. Yep. Everything is under that brand.

Mike Hambright (33:29.199)
Cool, we’ll add links down below for folks to find you easily. Great to see you, Frank. Always good to see you, buddy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, awesome. Guys, hopefully you got some insights from today. There’s a lot of ways to make money in this business, and if you become an expert, I think at the end of the day, a lot of us feel, don’t get into info marketing or coaching or anything because you think it’s easy, because it’s not. But if you feel this need to serve and help other people with the knowledge that you have, that’s really kind of how it starts. So go into this with passion, not…

Frank Chen (33:32.558)
Thank you, I appreciate that. Man, it’s been fun, Mike. I appreciate it. Yeah, I appreciate this. This is awesome. Thank you guys.

Mike Hambright (33:58.947)
dollar signs because it’s going to be harder than you think. I promise you, you’re going to have a lot of failures. It’s just part of the learning curve. And if you’re, if it’s all about money, you’re going to probably give up before you see the success that you want. And you’re going to say that doesn’t work when the reality is you got into it with a, with the wrong kind of goal in the first place. So, frankly, amazing resource. Make sure you check them out. If you’re looking to learn more. Hope you guys enjoyed today’s show. See you next time.

Frank Chen (34:02.318)
You

Frank Chen (34:21.134)
Bye guys.