#93: Affiliate Marketing Success with Rachel Luna

You know how important your list is to your business' growth. If you're measuring your list's health in terms of numbers, it can really get you down sometimes. It's easy to feel like the fate of your business is at a standstill until your list numbers in the thousands (or at least the high hundreds).
My guest on the podcast today is going to blow that myth out of the water! Rachel Luna is living proof that you don’t need a gigantic list to gain success. What really matters about your list isn’t the number of names and addresses on it, but the quality of those people in terms of their engagement with you.
Rachel’s success story is really a one-two punch. Not only does she show the power of what you can do with a highly engaged list, but she’s also a stellar example of how to do affiliate marketing right.
If you’ve thought about doing affiliate marketing but haven’t tried it…or if you’ve gone through it before with mediocre results…Rachel’s story is going to truly inspire you. And you’re also going to love the freebie Rachel created for us this week: it’s called the Confident Affiliate Marketing Starter Guide. You can get it by clicking here!
Secrets of an Affiliate Marketing Superstar Last spring, Rachel worked with my business coach Todd Herman and chose to be an affiliate promoter of his 90-Day Year program. As a business/life coach to other entrepreneurs, Rachel is ultra-focused on taking action and setting goals, which made her a perfect fit for this promotion.
Her message is all about breaking through negative thoughts and limiting beliefs to achieve the success you want. This promotion really gave her a chance to practice what she preached. Rachel came into Todd's affiliate program with a list just over 5000.
That may sound like a lot, but bear in mind she was working among affiliates who had lists upward of 100k! She was a small fish in a very big pond. Actually, I also happened to be working with Todd as an affiliate for this program, as well.
And as the promotion got going, I started seeing this name I'd never heard before popping up on the leader board. Her numbers were going up at an astonishing rate. Other affiliates were starting to talk about her.
"Who is this Rachel Luna, and what is her secret?" Finally, I decided to get in touch with her to find out just that. And today she is sharing the secrets of her affiliate marketing success with all of us! Click here to start listening now.
The Steps to Affiliate Marketing Success Rachel had done a few affiliate promotions in the past--by the time she got involved with Todd's 90-Day Year program, she had some solid standards for success in place:
She had rules to determine which affiliate programs she participates with. Rule #1 is not to promote anything she has not personally used. Rachel knows that to keep her list's trust, she has to limit her promotions to things that she knows will work and that she can offer knowledgeable support around.
She had a plan. It’s easy to think that because you’re working for someone else, you don’t have to put as much work into your launch. But Rachel really makes her affiliate partner’s business her own. She even created a Facebook group where she shared the details of her own success in using Todd’s program.
She had a revenue goal. This was Rachel’s fourth ever affiliate promotion, and she’d built up her capability over the previous three times. So this time, her goal was $14,000.
She set expectations. Right from the beginning, she let her audience know how long she’d be offering this free content from Todd. Doing this created urgency, and it also let anyone who wasn’t interested know that she wasn’t giving up her own brand forever.
She kept her audience engaged and accountable. Throughout the promotion, Rachel took a proactive approach to her audience. Every time content or a video was released, she would check in with her audience, tell them her takeaways and ask for theirs, keep tabs on whether they were doing their workbook exercise--whatever it took to keep them engaged. In essence, she treated the pre-launch content as if it were the program itself.
"If you can help them get results right from jump street, they trust you, and it helps them fall in love with the program."
Find out more about how Rachel achieved such amazing affiliate success! Click here to listen now.
Overcoming Your Setbacks You can see why Rachel was blowing us all away with her climbing numbers! This made it all the more devastating when, just one week before the official program kickoff, Rachel’s website got hacked. Everything she had planned for her promotion—blogs, sales pages, bonus materials that she’d created for her audience—was gone. Rachel considered not even doing the promotion. She’d spent hours putting all this together, only to have it wiped out overnight. But after talking with Todd, she decided to keep moving forward and see what happened.
"I sent off that first email which I had taken the time to write really well. I was very thoughtful about it. I was very intentional because I wanted to make sure it was something that would resonate with my audience."
And oh, did it ever resonate. By Day 1 of the promotion, Rachel had made $10k…almost 75% of her revenue goal. By Day 2, she’d surpassed her goal by $2000. By the time the launch ended, Rachel had made a $53,000 profit, almost four times her goal amount. By the way, this little fish, ended up finishing fourth overall out of all the affiliates promoting the program. Amazing!
You Don't Need a Big List to Get Big Results Rachel shares a lot more details of what made her affiliate launch such a staggering success--how much she spent on Facebook ads, how she structured bonuses for her audience, etc.--in the full podcast episode. And of course you'll want to download her amazing freebie, the Confident Affiliate Marketing Starter Guide.
EPISODE FREEBIE Get the Confident Affiliate Marketing Starter Guide FREE DOWNLOAD
But the biggest takeaway, in my view, was that Rachel didn't let the size of her email list stop her. She could have put off Todd's program until next time it came around, telling herself she was going to wait until her list was bigger. But instead, she took action with what she had, focused on maximizing her strengths, and didn't let setbacks slow her down.
"Sometimes, in my experience as a life coach, people aren’t so focused on taking action, they are focused on feeling better. They were happy with mediocre results. I want to have the best, most exciting. I want big."