2025 will be the year of the Affiliates
stop giving Google and Zuck all your money
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So what is an affiliate?
An affiliate is an individual or organization that promotes products or services on behalf of another company in exchange for a commission or other compensation. Affiliates act as intermediaries between the company and potential customers, often driving traffic or sales through various marketing channels like websites, blogs, social media, or email campaigns.
Affiliates are people with audiences - ideally audiences that would be a perfect fit for your product or service.
Here’s the inspo. for this post:
Ok, but why in the world should we listen to Atena??
Skool recently ran a competition for 100 communities to see who could grow the most in 90 days. Atena came in 2nd place:
$627,895 in 90 days isn’t bad. That’s $209,298 per month or $2,511,580/yr
But why is that interesting?
The winner, so I hear spends A LOT on ads. He even has it in his profile:
So yes, Ads do work, and lots of successful advisortech companies I talk to are dumping money into ads… to the tune of $30-40k per month. On Google Adsense, Facebook, Instagram…. And they’re cash-strapped.
What if there was a different way?
What if you had an army of affiliates?
Let me give a specific example:
Skool, a community building platform, is absolutely crushing Circle and Mighty Networks last I checked 6 months or so on SimilarWeb.
And its a much younger company.
How are they doing it?
Well many ways, but one is affiliates.
Skool is $99/mo - and they pay their affiliates $39/mo for as long as the referral has a community. That can add up to some serious MRR for the affiliate.
Their top affiliate is making $115k per month:
They also have this thing called “auto-affiliate”. So if someone joins your community and then ends up starting their own community, you auto-magically get affiliate income as long as they have a community.
This is the Ultimate Go-Giver mindset. Abundance… They are giving a giant chunk of their revenue away to their affiliates. But it’s clearly working.
You can watch the 2025 update on the company here where they go over their affiliate numbers including conversion, retention…
The people that sign up from an affiliate link convert higher, retain longer, and are more likely to become referrer’s themselves.
It’s what Jim Collins calls a Flywheel. And it spins faster and faster and faster until they literally have millions of superfans promoting the platform.
And yes, they do.
Ok, so how does this apply to me?
Q1 of this year, Skool is releasing an affiliate feature within a community - meaning members of your community can now start building monthly recurring revenue simply by inviting other people to join your community!
This turns all of your users, subscribers, fans into referral partners, or affiliates. And it works way better than ads.
Ads work, but in this new age of AI, people are going to be listening to people more than ever.
Advisors, consultants, advisortech user communities… all can start building their business ALONGSIDE their users own incomes!
And this is a much cooler way to grow in my opinion than paying Zuck.
People growing alongside People.
Let 2025 be the year you start a ROBUST affiliate offer for your clients.
Warmly,
Joe
P.S. check with your CCO before even thinking about this if you’re a financial advisor - works better I think if you’re running an OBA like these folks.