Affiliate Backoffice
Wondering what the key dates are?
- Jan 14 (Thursday): The first lesson of the free class is released at 12:01 AM Pacific.
- Jan 18 (Monday): The second lesson is released at 12:01 AM Pacific.
- Jan 21 (Thursday): The third lesson is released at 12:01 AM Pacific.
- Jan 24 (Sunday): Registration for the ACX Master Class opens for 6 days at 9:00 AM Pacific.
- Jan 29 (Friday): Registration closes at 9 PM Pacific.
Looking for your Affiliate Dashboard?
It’s here: https://acxmasterclass.com/affiliate-dashboard/
Looking for your unique referral link?
You’ll use that throughout the launch. It’s on your Affiliate Dashboard, in the LINKS section. It’s labeled “ACX MC 2021 Launch.”
Want to know more about how to be an affiliate?
Further down, you’ll find an extensive FAQ section that will answer any questions you might have about the launch itself.
If you have any other questions or need help from our team during the launch, email them to us at [email protected].
Frequently Asked Questions (and Answers!)
In this section, we answer questions that you might have about how the launch is put together and operates, what you need to know about being an affiliate, how you’ll get paid, how to optimize your email messaging, as well as maximizing how you tell people about the launch on social media and via any live event you’d like to do with David and/or Dan (subject to their availability).
We highly recommend that you take a bit of time and review this material – it will help you to be of service to your audience, and to maximize your effectiveness as an affiliate.
LAUNCH
A launch is simply a sequence of events that introduces a product or service to an audience, and makes it available for sale.
Launches can occur in many forms: a grand opening of a business, a new model year for a car manufacturer and the release of a blockbuster movie or video game are all examples of launches.
What they all have in common is a series of educational marketing messages, leading up to inviting the customer to purchase the product or service.
You’ve probably experienced the pre-launch of a movie: for months or even years, you’ll hear all about how it’s being made, who’s starring in it, and when it will be available in theaters or on TV.
That build up is the pre-launch for that movie.
The ACX Master Class (ACX MC) pre-launch is a lot more compact.
Over the course of a week or so, we present a series of three free video lessons, separate from the main course itself, that offers training in some aspect of audiobook narration. We make sure these free lessons solve a specific problem currently facing the group of customers we want to reach.
Affiliate Partners like you play a key role during that week, messaging your audience about the free lessons.
After we present these lessons online to potential customers, we then open registration for the full ACX MC course. We offer a special price, and include special bonuses with that offer that will no longer be available once registration ends.
Then we close registration, and start supporting the students who have registered. That process also takes about a week.
From the beginning of the pre-launch videos to the end of the registration period, it’s 15 days for our launch.
The pre-launch begins on January 14 with the release of the first free video lesson, the second lesson on January 18th, the third lesson on January 21st, and the registration will open on January 24th and close on January 29th.
AFFILIATE
An Affiliate Partner (that’s you!) is someone who has a following or audience that could benefit from what another company’s product or service has to offer, and they happily and enthusiastically message their audience about the product.
Usually, that product isn’t something the Affiliate Partner offers themselves.
As their audience members purchase the product, the Affiliate Partner is given a commission on each purchase. For the launch of the ACX Master Class program, our Affiliate Partners are paid $300 for each sale.
But in the case of the ACX Master Class, it’s more than just money. We want to work with people who share our vision of empowering performers to who want to build a successful business narrating audiobooks on ACX.
Anyone who has an audience, followers, are influencers, teachers, enthusiasts…anyone. And we look for people in particular who want to be change agents in their audience members’ lives, helping them achieve success in audiobook narration.
As an example, one of our Affiliate Partners teaches actors how to take care of their voices, maximizing their vocal health with natural practices and products. As a complement to what she offers, she partners with us during our launches, informing her followers about the ACX Master Class to help them with the development of their performance career.
There are no legal conflicts, but if you feel you can’t message your audience about other offerings than your own, or if you just aren’t comfortable with (or don’t like) marketing, or you don’t like to be compensated for saying nice things about someone else’s offering, then being a partner might not be for you.
Affiliate marketing has a negative reputation for some, because the Internet is filled with people who promise things that their product or service simply can’t deliver.
We’re not like that. For almost a decade, we’ve been helping our clients find success in building an audiobook narration business on ACX. And our Affiliate Partners aren’t like that. We prefer making an impact in the lives of our customers, but we know it’s also up to them to engage in what we teach. We make no promises of overnight success, and we make it very clear that there are no guarantees in the world of performance.
And all of our Affiliate Partners deliver our message with no promises or guarantees.
It depends on how quickly you compose and send emails, post on social media, or organize and conduct a live event or podcast episode. On average, when Dan or David acts as an Affiliate Partner for their colleagues, they’ll spend about 20-30 minutes a day during the course of the launch preparing the messaging and sending it to their audience – on those days when they have something to send. On other days, there’s no time spent on this at all.
Your mileage may vary. But…it’s not even a part time job.
A referral is the term used anytime one of the Affiliate Partner’s followers decides to join the audience of the company whose product they are promoting. That person is a referral. And you use a unique referral link to send them our way (more on that in a moment).
For example, if you message your audience about the free course, and one of your audience members signs up to watch during our pre-launch, that person is a referral from you to us.
Note that they haven’t purchased anything. They’re just doing a little window-shopping.
A referral link is a special web link, unique to each Affiliate Partner (that’s you!), so we can keep track of which of our Affiliate Partners has sent us a referral, and know how many they have sent.
When a Partner’s audience members see that unique referral link in an email, in a social media post or on their screen and click on it, they’ll end up seeing our information (like our free videos, or the registration page to join the ACX Master Class) just like everyone else, but our affiliate management system will know it’s from that particular Affiliate Partner.
When you applied for our affiliate program (run by our friends at SamCart), you filled out a form letting us know who you are and how we can contact you.
When we approved you, our affiliate program assigned you your unique affiliate link. You can find it by clicking on the Affiliate Dashboard link on the menu at the top of this page.
When you get that dashboard, scroll down to the LINKS section, and you’ll see a link labeled ACX MC 2021 Launch. Your link is to the right of that label.
Copy and paste that link into your messaging whenever you send your follower our way.
And don’t worry…that link will remain the same for the entire launch, so you can keep pasting it in the same way, every time you message your audience.
To show you how to test that when someone clicks on your affiliate link, you get proper credit, David made a how-to-test video for one of his launches, and it will work exactly the same way for you – just test your ACX Master Class referral link in the same way he shows you here (you can go full screen with this video):
The affiliate link that SamCart generates is, by necessity unique, long, gnarly and ugly, and you REALLY need to make your referral link shorter and easier to read.
We think it’s imperative that you do this, because it will increase your engagement. David really prefers the Redirection plugin, but it can only be used if you have a WordPress site.
The others options that work great as well are link shorteners like bitly and tinyurl.
You can turn a no-so-easy-to-say-or-copy-down link like this:
https://register.acxmasterclass.com/referral/ap101/5NxmASsVPTjUgr
into something like this:
bit.ly/acxmcgo (if your choice is available)
Go for it!
First, we know because we can tell what link someone clicked to visit us. We compare that link to our list of Affiliate Partners, and we can see it’s from you.
But more importantly, our system places a cookie in the browser of your audience member (with their permission). That cookie lets us know whenever they come back to us that they came from you.
Of course, audiences are often shared among Partners, especially if they are in related fields, like the performing arts. If an audience member who has already been assigned to you then clicks on an affiliate link from another Affiliate Partner supporting our launch, they will be reassigned to them. That’s why it’s important to stay in touch with audience members throughout the launch process, and encourage them to visit us via your link.
(And the reverse is also true – if someone is sent to us by another Affiliate Partner, but then they click on your link after that, they’ll be reassigned to you.)
A conversion occurs when a referral becomes a customer, and buys the product or service being offered.
If a referral never buys that product, they remain a referral, and no money changes hands between the company and the Affiliate Partner (because no sale was made).
But if, in our case, a referral watches our free training and then decides to purchase the ACX Master Class, that referral then becomes a conversion (they “converted” from someone just window-shopping to someone who went in and bought what was in the window), and you’re credited with the commission due on that purchase.
If you click on the link in the menu at the top of this page, and visit your Affiliate Dashboard over at SamCart, you’ll see a number of things being counted.
You’ll see clicks, which is the number of times your referral link has been clicked on. This roughly translates to referrals.
You’ll see conversions, which is the number of referrals that have purchased from us.
And you’ll see other items, like conversion percentage, commission totals, payments to you and more.
We take a great deal of pride in only inviting people we know align with our mission, our values and our content. Even the Affiliate Partners with the smallest followings (like, fewer than 25 followers or email list members) generate some amount of interest. In fact, one of our top affiliates from a recent launch got 5 conversions from a list of only 44 people.
And she did it because she spoke from the heart, related her own experience with the ACX Master Class, with David and Dan and what they had to offer, then told her followers that he could help them create a better audiobook narration experience.
And she messaged them throughout the launch with different aspects of that story. Because she is authentic, believable, and takes terrific care of her followers in her own offerings (she helps actors with their vocal health), they trusted her and have been happy students ever since.
You’ll likely be surprised at how much interest you’ll generate.
It’s all about focusing on being of service, not sales. Even if you don’t achieve any sales on our behalf, you’ll find that when you can create change in someone’s life, you’ll benefit in the long run.
Of course, it’s usually better for your conversion stats and your sales if you take the path we lay out for you, and message your followers on the days during the launch that we suggest. Across two weeks, that’s a total of 8 messaging opportunities, including the 3 pre-launch lessons, and 5 messages during registration week.
For some, that’s an easy task. For others, not so much.
And you also want to strongly consider doing some combination of email, social media, live event, podcast, blog post, video or whatever you prefer.
But no matter what you decide, a home run for us is you being of service to YOUR audience, and we want to do the same. We don’t want you to promote us just to make some money; we want you to promote us because we can create change and make impact in an actor’s life.
That’s a home run for us.
Affiliate Partners can been really creative with this. In addition to linking to our free course and to the registration to the ACX Master Class when it opens, they’ve offered things like:
• A free hour of private coaching in the Affiliate Partner’s field
• A personal social media audit with suggestions on improvements
• An eBook that was filled with useful calming techniques
• An infographic that showed them how to set up a branding workflow
• A group weekend with other converted referrals from their list
• and more
The only thing we require you not to do is to offer any sort of discount on our training, nor the sharing of your commission with your audience member who purchases from us.
Other than that, your bonus(es) can be anything, as long as they are useful and impactful. That’s the sort of bonus that makes a difference in someone’s life. But then…you already knew that.
MONEY
It’s absolutely free. We don’t charge anything to be an Affiliate Partner. You do have to give us a W-9 (or the equivalent if you’re outside the US), so we can pay you.
You receive $300 for each conversion. It’s pretty simple! And there’s no limit as to the number of referrals you get credit for, or conversions you get paid for.
No. As we said earlier, that’s the one thing we don’t allow. We want a level playing field for everyone, and we don’t want anyone discounting what is already an underpriced, premium offering.
Once we tally up the final results after the end of the launch, Affiliate Partners who have earned a commission will be paid that commission within 30 business days.
Actually, that’s never happened. Ever.
We have a very clear no-refund policy on purchases of the course, as students get access to the entire package all at once. It’s as simple as that.
And there’s something else that’s really interesting about this policy: no one’s ever asked us for a refund. I’m sure it will happen someday, and we’ll point out the policy to them. But…it’s never happened. Make of that what you will.
(We think it’s because we are agents for change, and attract the best talent in the universe as students. But that’s just us.)
Should there ever be an exception made to that policy, yes, we’ll ask you for the commission back.
That’s OK. You can be effective with a tiny list if they are truly fans. Or no list at all, if you’re totally active on social media, or you are a champ at holding a webinar or a Facebook Live.
It’s true that an entrepreneur’s number one job is to have a channel to connect with their audience, and that in most cases, email far and away outpaces any other channel.
But it’s not a deal killer if you don’t have thousands, or even hundreds, or even dozens of email list subscribers.
You can email your contacts directly (don’t put them all in the TO box, OK? BCC is the way to go), but you’ll find that it’s easier to manage the whole process if you use an email list management service. David adores Aweber and uses them for all of his email marketing.
We have faith in you. You’re an artist.
Take a deep breath, return to home base, and remember to be of service. Tell a story about your relationship with audiobook narration, David, Dan, the ACX Master Class you’ve taken or your struggle to be at peace with the audiobook narration process. These are universal themes that can be the bases for powerful storytelling.
An expert in this matter, Jeff Walker, has the perfect answer for this: your messaging should be no longer or shorter than necessary.
On average, a few short paragraphs telling your story or describing a problem your follower might have, and how we can help solve it, with your affiliate link in there, is plenty. And if you tell your story from the heart, you’ll find your writing will be just right.
We’ve got you covered. Dan will send you a sample to work from a day or two before each scheduled mailing. And you can use that messaging to craft social media posts as well.
You could just copy and paste what Dan sends you into an email or post and send them off to your audience.
But we suggest something better.
Use them as inspiration. Copy and paste them into a blank text field, then change them to suit your needs. Tell the story that’s the theme of the sample email, but tell it your way.
Start changing around the words and editing the flow to match your authentic writing voice. Rewrite it your way, but…
…don’t forget to include your ACX Master Class referral link. (Don’t laugh. That’s been forgotten in the past.)
Again, we’ll have a new example for each big day in the launch: the three free lessons during pre-launch, and peppered throughout the registration week that follows. They will be sent to you a day or two before the date they should be sent to your followers.
There are 7 suggested days within the launch that you should message your audience, either via email, social media or both.
And you aren’t required to do this, but the message gets read if you do. Those days are:
• Free video lesson #1
• Free video lesson #2
• Free video lesson #3
• Registration opening day
• Whatever day you hold a live event (if you do)
• The day before registration closes
• The day registration closes
Again, this is suggested based on past performance. You should do what you’re comfortable with.
And should you be concerned about people unsubscribing from your list, you might also read the FAQ regarding unsubscribes below.
There are a lot of very smart people who completely disagree on the answer to this question, and it’s hard to pin down as people consume their email in different ways at different times of the day and week.
We prefer to have the email we send out waiting for the follower in the morning when they wake up, but we’re also known to email about certain events in the early afternoon.
And the final day of registration, we emails twice in one day.
But remember…if you’re being of service, and giving useful information and frames of reference throughout the process, and your followers trust you, they are more likely to want to hear from you, no matter what time of day you land in their inbox.
Yes. Some of them absolutely will. Heck, they’ll unsubscribe even if you don’t email them ever!
And do you know what else might happen?
You might gain subscribers as your current followers forward your message to their friends. That’s what happened to our number one affiliate a few years ago. She called us, amazed that she actually gained subscribers during that year’s launch.
Here’s a great sentence to use as a PS in your emails:
Please feel free to forward this to any fellow actor you think might find better auditioning useful. I’m on a mission to help as many friends and colleagues as I can.
That phrase is guaranteed to generate more referrals than not doing it, will add people to your mailing list, and won’t offend or tick anyone off.
Again, it’s all about being of service. If someone feels they are simply being used as a potential wallet that can be pried open, you’re going to see them leave. But if you’re of service and you write and post to them with their benefit in mind, amazing things can and do happen.
SOCIAL
Of course. You want to support your email messaging with social media “look in your inbox” messages, or hints at what they’ll find when they do.
It’s not one or the other. And for all the major social media networks, we have content in the swipe files for each event day of the launch.
Certainly. Posting to your timeline, adding a quick video or image, or any of the other myriad ways you have of posting on your own profiles, pages and in your own groups…go for it.
I would be very careful about that. If you are clear that the group owner is OK with you doing so, great. We are members of a number of very supportive groups that have actually asked us to post information about the ACX Master Class in their groups.
But only do it if you have their explicit permission – and you’re always being of service to their members.
Tweet away. Adding videos of up to 2 minutes (that’s the limit on Twitter unless you’re very, very special) are extraordinarily effective, and make sure to place your referral link in the body of the tweet.
Go for it. Remember that IG loves square videos, photos that tell a story and emojis in your post.
And be sure to put your referral link in your IG bio so people can click on it (they can’t click on anything else except Instagram-purchased ads), and refer to the fact that the link is there in your posts and stories. Use the hashtag #LinkInBio.
Oh, gosh yes. YouTube is the second most used search engine in the world, and making a video for your YT followers is an excellent way to connect (and tell your story live on camera).
Your referral link should be shown on screen if you can add a title to your video, and you should also put it in the “show notes” below your video.
Yes.
Create a board for the launch, with images around audiobooks and narration, and keep your followers posted on how the free lessons and the registration weekdays progress.
If they allow it, please do. Just be sure not to spam boards or groups, and stay within all terms of service listings.
You can, but you do so out of your own pocket, and we need to review and approve any ads you want to run.
It’s an advanced strategy, so please don’t do it if you aren’t totally comfortable with how ads work and are optimized.
LIVE
Subject to their availability, yes. Just pop us an email at [email protected] and ask about their schedule.
Here are some things to keep in mind:
• Message your audience with direct links to the scheduled event.
• Remind your audience about an hour before you’re going live.
• Have a theme for the event around solving a problem.
• Engage your audience with questions.
• Monitor the comments. Place them on the screen if your software allows it.
• Don’t spend a lot of time waiting for people to show up once the session starts.
• Say hello and get going.
• Ask for shares and likes several times throughout the event to draw more people live.
• Create a PowerPoint deck with the points you want to make and share your screen.
• Use software like eCamm Live or StreamYard to up your video look and sound.
• Be sure to have your referral link handy and show it often.
• Leave plenty of time for questions.
• Offer a special bonus if your followers sign up before the end of the day via your link.
• Place your referral link in the description of your Facebook Live or YouTube Live posting.
Zoom, of course, because…Zoom, especially if you want to keep things just to your followers.
For public Lives on Facebook and YouTube, we really love eCamm Live – it’s for Macintosh only, but it’s amazingly well done.
Another option is StreamYard, which is rock solid software. You can find it here: https://danoday.com/try-streamyard
And if you have to, BeLive.TV. If you have to.
That would be an extraordinarily creative thing to do, that no one has asked about, ever. So it’s a sneaky very-infrequently-asked-question that was slipped into this FAQ at the last minute by some hooligans in the neighborhood.
Do it, and produce it ahead of the launch, positioning its release either the day of the registration opening on January 24th, or a few days before registration closes on January 29th.