Join Alex Standiford in this episode of ‘Partnership’ as he discusses building and leveraging online partnerships with Melissa Love, founder of ‘The Design Space‘ and ‘The Marketing Fix‘.
Melissa shares her journey from being a web designer to creating successful collaborative courses and a thriving membership community. Learn how she uses partnerships to evolve her offerings and build a dynamic membership platform. Discover the strategies for leveraging industry experts, maintaining affiliate programs, and ensuring consistent content updates. Don’t miss out on these valuable insights for bootstrapped businesses!
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Alex: Welcome to Partnership, where your network is the wind in your sails. I’m your host, Alex Standiford, and I’m here to redefine online partnerships for bootstrapped businesses. I believe in working with top talent to expand your sales channels and enrich the lives around you, not just the pockets of big corporations.
[00:00:19] Alex: Today, I’m speaking with Melissa Love, founder of the design space and the marketing fix. Melissa has built a thriving business centered around collaboration. She is an expert at leveraging partnerships with industry experts, and with those connections has created collaborative courses and a thriving membership community.
[00:00:37] Alex: In this episode, I chat with Melissa and explore how she uses partnerships to continually evolve her offerings and build a successful membership platform.
[00:00:46] Alex: Hey, Melissa, how’s it going? Thanks for being on the show.
[00:00:48] Melissa: Hey, it’s so good to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:50] Alex: Yeah, of course. So Melissa, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and, how you kind of came into creating your courses and everything that you’ve got going on?
[00:00:58] Melissa: Yeah, absolutely. Like most people, my courses, do and have ended up focusing on kind of my core skills. But, you know, back in the day, I was just a regular old web designer and, , I had young kids and, At a certain point, I just felt I was getting a little bit burnt out. So my first product actually wasn’t a course.
[00:01:14] Melissa: It was, I started to sell WordPress themes, which I do to this day. And it was specifically aimed at photographers and kind of creatives. So, and that went really well. I really kind of took the pressure off me just doing, , photography site after photography site and getting a little bit burnt out, the school holidays, it kind of saved my sanity.
[00:01:30] Melissa: And then obviously people were building. We’re like, wow, we love these templates, but we dunno how to use WordPress. So that was the kind of my very first dip to toe into courses. And I did my, build your own WordPress website was my flagship course. It still exists actually. And that was my kind of next step.
[00:01:48] Melissa: And then people were saying to you, well, this is great. I’ve built my own website, but I don’t know anything about marketing. So my kind of furthest iteration where I am now is I then kind of added. I brought the course inside of membership and I added some other courses about mostly kind of around using your website as the engine to power your marketing machine, plus some other things.
[00:02:07] Melissa: And it’s kind of grown from there. So really just by listening to my audience and listening to them saying, well, what next, has kind of led me on that journey of from just trading time for money and being a designer, which I still do a little bit off, but really, going down the product creation route and now course and membership.
[00:02:22]
[00:02:22] I’ve heard stories similar to this, where people, they’re building their thing. They’re learning their skills. And then they, they realize that there’s people consistently asking for the same things and they’re able to package that up into some kind of product and then sell it.
[00:02:33] Alex: and it sounds like what you’ve done is kind of similar to that. In a lot of ways, it just ended up being courses.
[00:02:38] Melissa: Yeah. And I survey my audience a lot. So my best advice is just always be listening to what they’re saying. They will tell you what they need.
[00:02:46] Alex: Yeah, that’s great. So with these courses that you’ve created, I whenever I was looking at them, you actually have some guests on the show. A lot of the people, in my audience, They’re actually interested in doing something like that.
[00:02:56] Alex: They’re all very interested in partnering up with other people and learning how to, find opportunities and explore that. And I’m really interested to hear a little bit more about that specific aspect of it. So you have other course creators on your site and kind of like, how do they fit into all of this?
[00:03:11] Melissa: So when I started the membership, I wanted to create something that I wished I’d had when I was starting out and I couldn’t afford to hire every mate, like the best person to tell me about Pinterest strategy or the best person to this. So when we got into setting up the marketing membership, I thought, Really, it was a little bit selfish.
[00:03:27] Melissa: I thought this would be a great way to crowdsource through the membership fees. Really, really good guests to come in so that each month the members are getting like the latest intel on a particular topic, whether it’s SEO or TikTok. We just had someone install that TikTok. And I just kind of looked around and I thought, who’s really good at this?
[00:03:43] Melissa: And I was just really cheeky. I would just write to people and say, look, we’ve got 200 and odd members. you can come in and you can pitch at the end, or we can pay you. Can’t do both, but do you, are you interested in this opportunity? You know, we have a list of, X many thousand, we will promote you to our whole list.
[00:03:58] Melissa: We’ll use it as a way to get people on board. You can earn affiliate income. So, and people started saying yes. And, once you get the more people who say yes, more people are like, Oh yeah, I’ve seen that person also, guesting in her membership. So it’s evolved into now. I’m like, great.
[00:04:12] Melissa: I can look around and just find like the best person to come in. And often as we’ve, as the memberships matured, we’re kind of into year four now. sometimes the guests present to the members themselves. So it’s not always kind of the famous person in that genre. We’ve just literally had a session yesterday, an amazing one of our members who did a session on vision boarding for your business.
[00:04:30] Melissa: So it was just super cool. So, yeah, we’ve got, we have a really good wide range of interesting topics now. And, and if it aligns with my particular skill set, I will probably one in four teach the session as well.
[00:04:41] Alex: Gotcha, that’s cool. So you’re kind of tag teaming these things with the creators whenever it makes sense. and then if not, you’re probably taking notes yourself. I find myself doing that a lot.
[00:04:49] Melissa: Oh, absolutely. It’s proper. Very selfish on my part, you know, I couldn’t afford to hire all of these people in my business, but once a month I get the opportunity to really, you know, really enjoy listening to it. Yeah, listening to people.
[00:05:02] Alex: It sounds like you, you were, using basically direct outreach. So you were just finding people who you thought would be a good fit, and you were just reaching out directly. Does that seem right?
[00:05:11] Melissa: Yeah. And that’s what I still do now. I go to quite a lot of marketing conferences and I keep an eye on the speakers and I look for people who I meet. I belong to myself to a couple of memberships. So I use that as a way to scout potentially new people as well.
[00:05:22] Alex: Whenever you’re pitching this and you’re talking to these course creators what are some of the key things that you’re offering them that like, what’s the incentive for them?
[00:05:32] Alex: what are you giving them that’s attracting them to come in the first place?
[00:05:35] Melissa: Well, we’re giving them access to an audience and it’s not just the audience of members because they’re obviously getting the session for free. But if depending on what, on the terms that we agree, most people are really keen to pitch to an audience who are proven investors that already investing in a membership.
[00:05:50] Melissa: They’ve then getting access to this, to a group of people who are serious about growing their business. So they will often do quite good sales off the back of an appearance. And on top of that, we will also, we do a mail shot out to our whole list, which is 20 K subs, and then we will also tag them on all the socials.
[00:06:05] Melissa: So for, you know, most people have, um, A standard, um, masterclass, which they give like a 60 minute session. So for most people, it’s, I’m normally asking them to present something they already have prepared or that if they haven’t done it before, some people like to use it to kind of try out new material as well, so.
[00:06:23] Alex: Gotcha.
[00:06:24] Melissa: as we said in kind of financial terms as well, they can join our affiliate program. So they’re getting kind of extra sales on top of the booking and they can also, you know, they’re sharing with their audience, which we encourage them to do.
[00:06:34] Melissa: There are some speakers who are just You know, they charge significant fees. So sometimes I will say, look, have you got something pre recorded? And we’ll do it and I’ll play it live. And then they’ll pop in for questions at the end. If it’s someone who’s kind of a little bit out of my league, I will offer them, you know, an option to do a non live.
[00:06:52] Melissa: Present, not live presentation, but just do a little Q and A.
[00:06:55] Alex: gotcha. Gotcha. Cool.
[00:06:56] Melissa: But do you know, it’s so funny, right? They said people are so conscientious about their content that they actually end up turning up for the whole hour anyway, and being there in the comments, answering questions during the whole thing when they could have just presented it. Like, it always makes me laugh.
[00:07:09] Melissa: I’m like, yeah, I’ll just pop in at the end. They’re like, actually, I’ll just, I’ll be there. So
[00:07:13] Alex: I’ll just be there. Yeah, I get that. That, I mean, come on. It’s a show all about you for an hour. It’s hard to not go to your own party.
[00:07:19] Melissa: yeah, exactly.
[00:07:20] Alex: how are you finding these course creators? It sounds like you’d mentioned something about, going to marketing events.
[00:07:25] Alex: can you expand on that a little bit?
[00:07:26] Melissa: my membership is about marketing. So I go to social media marketing world in San Diego. most years. I also go to the UK’s biggest conference, which is called Atomicon. And then I’m in the kind of little gang of marketing nerds. And we often go to smaller conferences and sit there and go, Oh, they’re good.
[00:07:41] Melissa: Or, you know, and I belong to through the kind of atomic community. Who’s one of the, that’s one of the memberships I’m in who do the conference. With I often recruit from within that community I recruit from within our own community. yeah, so just constantly being on the lookout and I listen to podcasts where, so things like Pat Flynn’s podcast is really good one for his, SPI for picking up kind People who are unusual in their field, who are really a niche presenters.
[00:08:05] Melissa: I think that’s really, that really fascinates people. Like we’ve just done the vision boarding and people are like, what? This is so cool. So I try not to just do, Hey, here’s another thing that you could hear, on YouTube. I try and look for people these days. I look for people, things that are a bit more cutting edge, a bit more niche, a bit more out there.
[00:08:22] Melissa: So people are like, Oh, cool.
[00:08:24] Alex: Whenever it comes to, that outreach, are there any kind of common hesitations or, things that you kind of have to overcome, whenever you’re speaking with these people that they might say, I’m not interested because of X, like, what is that? Are there any barriers like that?
[00:08:36] Alex: Or are you just well networked enough? And by the time you meet them, you already know them and trust them and you don’t have a lot of barriers. I
[00:08:43] Melissa: definitely do a bit of a warming up phase. I kind of gently kind of stalk them. So I will connect on social media. I will, just drop them a line saying, Hey, I really love this podcast you did. Or, you know, blah, blah, blah. What do you think about this? So I will definitely have connected with them.
[00:08:59] Melissa: And if I’ve seen them in person, I will. so it’s more just I make sure I’m not going in cold. I think I’ve done it once or twice with authors who’ve written books that I’ve loved. And it’s a lot harder when you go in cold. like they don’t know who I am, especially if they’re based in the States or they’re not in my kind of niche audience.
[00:09:15] Melissa: So, one tip that somebody took, which gave me is if it’s someone I’m kind of going in cold, I will make them a personalized video. And what I will do is I will,Do a screen share where I, superimpose myself as the little face. So I’m screen sharing their own website. So when I send them the email, I take a screenshot of my face in front of their website, so they will see that image in there in the email and think, Oh, that’s my website.
[00:09:42] Alex: Oh, that’s clever.
[00:09:43] Melissa: and so I will say, Hey, I’m just making this because, you don’t know me, but I really know you and I love your work. I’ve just been looking at your website and this is really cool. Love this blog post or whatever. And I just wondered if you’d consider, and I make my pitch and then I, type that out as well.
[00:09:56] Melissa: And I, I’ve got a link called, work with us page, which has all our figures, our stats. And I put, I just bullet point out the key, the key numbers like X many subscribers on our list, this many members. here’s what we include, blah, blah, blah, several options. We pay you, you pitch and we say, I say, do you want to jump on a call?
[00:10:14] Melissa: You know, I’d love to chat about this and, very occasionally it doesn’t work, but at least at the very worst, I always get a polite no or
[00:10:20] Alex: You at least get a response.
[00:10:22] Melissa: yeah, absolutely.
[00:10:23] Alex: Yeah, I think, in this age where there’s so many automated blast emails and stuff like that, I think the most important thing is to prove that, one, that you’re a human, and two, that this is not a a scattershot email. This is sent to you specifically. so I think, I think that your video idea is really clever because I think it does that.
[00:10:42] Melissa: I also, if I can, I, I ask for an intro from someone I know. So because I speak at conferences, I’m kind of on the speaker circuit. So I, there’s normally someone who can get me an in, like a proper intro. Okay. Oh,
[00:10:55] Alex: Whenever it comes to. Maintaining these, are these courses or it’s because you had mentioned that they’re live streamed to. are these courses intended to be evergreen or is there kind of a rotation of content over time that happens?
[00:11:10] Melissa: it’s a good question. The perennial problem is when you start a membership, you’ve got no content.
[00:11:14] Melissa: my flagship course, which you’ve already talked about, build your own website. And I kind of pulled a couple of bonuses that when I made the course, I worked with some very smart people and, they said like survey your audience.
[00:11:25] Melissa: So when I looked, by the way, never do this, I built a whole course without surveying anyone. And I was literally just, I kind of went to a friend who’s the You know, I was making a lot of money from online education. I he’s like, Oh, so what do you diligence you’ve done? What research? I was like, Oh, absolutely not.
[00:11:39] Melissa: I just think people are going to love my course. And he was like, no, they’re not. So he made me go out and survey my audience, which was amazing. Cause he said, what were the topics? People said they absolutely wanted the most. And it was. SEO and branding. He said, whatever the two top topics are, pull them out and turn them into bonus mini courses.
[00:11:57] Melissa: Don’t put them in the main body of the course. I was like, Oh, you genius. So I’d already kind of broken my course down, so it didn’t feel like completely empty. And then I kind of recorded two or three courses to book in that. And that has, evolved over time to have, we’ve got this set of core courses, which we call the roadmap.
[00:12:15] Melissa: So if you do nothing else, we encourage you to go through the business blueprint, which kind of helps you collect your KPIs. It helps you if you’ve never set goals before, if you don’t know how to use a spreadsheet, it takes you through a lot of business basics and helps you get clear on your. your vision and on your straplines and all that kind of stuff.
[00:12:32] Melissa: And then they go into building. So our membership is all about building your first funnel. And that’s what the roadmap is. But then, you know, I wanted to then have something like, say, you’ve done the roadmap and your funnels up and running, what then? So that’s why we have the monthly guest or the monthly topic.
[00:12:46] Melissa: So you can always be kind of sharpening your saw. You’re always getting the latest intel on what’s hot out there in the marketing world. And But at any point you can go back and refresh yourself from the core. Of course, with the monthly topic, some things do need culling every, you know, every six months I’ll go back through the back catalog and think, you know, remove Facebook ads from three years ago, or, you know, there’s, there’s going to be things that age out of being relevant and we just quietly remove them.
[00:13:11] Alex: It sounds like in terms of the live stuff specifically, it’s evergreen ish. So you’re you’re zoomed in a little bit more than say a book but you’re , Zoomed out far enough that most of the content is relevant for at least a couple years and you’re probably you’re just kind Of cycling through that as you go Makes a lot of sense because, , I do think that’s kind of a gap, at least for me, where, whenever I’m reading books, because again, it’s so zoomed out, it has to be so focused on like being as evergreen as possible.
[00:13:33] Alex: So they never talk about tactics. They never talk about tools and stuff like that most of the time because of that exact problem. So I think you’re solving that by zooming in a little bit more. And allowing people to get access to that content and get that, you know, direct. What do we need today? What are the tools today to solve the problem that I just learned about in this book?
[00:13:50] Melissa: and some topics come around each year. So we have someone comes in to do, you know, SEO in 2024. We’ve just had and we’ll have Facebook ads in 2024. And then we’re going to have, Instagram. I’m probably looking at someone to do TikTok ads soon. We try and update that content.
[00:14:03] Melissa: We don’t just kind of cull it and never replace it. But I am aware with more technical things. But what’s been super interesting, I think, is, when you first start a membership, you’re obsessed by having enough content. But what I’ve discovered is if there’s too much content, people disengage and they get overwhelmed.
[00:14:17] Melissa: And the retention falls. So we were pretty actively culling our content and also what people really value is the one to one coaching. So we’ve actually ended up really focusing more on that. If nothing else, if you do the business blueprint, but then come to, we have five hours of live coaching, not with me every week, but with various people.
[00:14:38] Melissa: So we have a copywriter, we have a strategist, we have a tech person, we have a business coach. So at any, we have a social media expert. So at any point during the week, at any number of times across various times, you can get face to face with one of those people. And we found that’s been more of an incentive for people to stay and be retained and, as much content as you want to throw at them.
[00:14:59] Alex: It makes a lot of sense. I do know that, I mean, I’ve, had that experience too, where I’ve been overwhelmed by the amount of content and I just do nothing. Like it actually paralyzes me.
[00:15:07] Melissa: Yeah, exactly.
[00:15:08] Alex: That’s great. Okay, cool. So, earlier you had talked a little bit about, um, offering, you offer your, uh, these creators an incentive program, and I think the format, of your Membership really plays well into that because you have an ongoing rotation of speakers and ongoing rotation of people who are coming in and personally associating themselves with your product.
[00:15:31] Alex: It just seems like you’ve set yourself up really well to just migrate those people into an affiliate program. I mean, they’ve already got an audience. I’m sure if they’re doing speaking in there. They’re, they’re already engaging with you, so it just seems like a natural next step. I bet your affiliate program’s pretty great, actually.
[00:15:48] Alex: Can you tell me a little bit about, what that process looks like, transitioning them over and offering that to them? , and kind of how that plays into everything.
[00:15:55] Melissa: Yeah, sure. I’d say 50 percent of our affiliate income comes from people who’ve guested the membership, but the other 50 percent comes from the members and everyone has the same deal, pretty much. So we offer 30 percent and you can split it however you like with your audience.
[00:16:07] Melissa: You can have 15, 15 or 10, 20, whatever you want to do. We have a very few select people who get a little bit more than that, than who get 40, but those are kind of more power affiliates. And for, so as the, each month when we have the new topic, we will, we have a kind of two week promo cycle around it.
[00:16:25] Melissa: And we give everyone a code to get their first month free. You can use it once. And then we kind of configure it’s up to us to. Convert them so well in the first month that we retain them. So we pay our affiliates one month behind, like if the person comes in through their affiliate link, but they don’t actually ever pay us anything, they’re not going to get paid out.
[00:16:42] Melissa: So, yeah, so that’s what we do. It’s pretty straightforward. If we, I mean, affiliates are getting emailed like once a month, they’re in, they know about the sales cycle.
[00:16:49] Alex: It’s great. so it sounds like you’re using, , 30 percent commission, and then you have some power affiliates that are , at the 40%. Can you tell me a little bit about the, what Yeah. Yeah. What the power affiliates do that’s different because , I think it makes a lot of sense to have different tiers of affiliates for sure, based on what they do.
[00:17:05] Alex: But you tell me a little bit about kind of what your expectations are from what you would consider your power affiliate?
[00:17:11] Melissa: I don’t have any different expectations, but they just have a bigger reach. They have a bigger audience. that’s how I recognize that.
[00:17:17] Alex: Gotcha. What are the, some of the first steps that someone should take when they’re looking to find affiliates for their own program?
[00:17:22] Melissa: Oh, that’s such a good question. Well, we started with our own audience. So we, and when you first launched your membership, If it’s fairly new, you have a lot of new members who are very, very enthusiastic. So as part of our onboarding process, it’s an automated onboarding process.
[00:17:34] Melissa: We invite them to become affiliate. and that normally lands after the first time they subscribe and pay us money. We then invite them to become an affiliate. And we talk about it in the group. We let them know, you know, what’s coming up. So our kind of member outreach is automated, but it’s, we try and get them early on.
[00:17:50] Melissa: So that would be your first step is, you know, create your own raving fans and get them to be your. And yeah, and for us, cause we have this monthly sales cycle, it’s pretty straightforward. We just bring on a new affiliate each time. So, and if they’re new, if they’re new to us, if they’ve never done, a guest spot before, great, they’ll probably be sending out to the audience and our regulars who we see maybe once a year who come in, they know the deal anyway.
[00:18:12] Melissa: The other thing that I do is I often do content swaps. I will guest in other people’s audiences. So that’s another great way. If you’re generous with your own time, you find that people are kind of happy to repay the favor.
[00:18:23] Alex: Can you tell me a little bit about how you determine, the types of affiliates that are best suited for your program?
[00:18:28] Alex: Like what makes them a good affiliate to you
[00:18:30] Melissa: Well, to me, it’s, if their specialist topic matter falls within that is going to be of interest to our audience, then they’re going to be a great affiliate. We’re going to, they’re going to have more of those same people in their own audience, you know? So I always look for people who I’m, Kind of, we’re in a related field, but we’re not in competition with each other.
[00:18:48] Melissa: That’s the most important thing. So in the, for example, in the photography world, like I’m not going to ask someone else who sells website templates to guest or another designer, I am going to ask someone who sells a different tool that a photographer might use. So we have a great relationship with. Pick time who have photographer galleries, but they don’t sell websites.
[00:19:06] Melissa: So that’s a really good example of a mutually or Chris from Lifter LMS, we refer back and forth and that’s a great, I make themes for Lifter LMS. He wants themes for Lifter LMS. Everybody’s happy. so
[00:19:16] Alex: win win.
[00:19:17] Melissa: tool, actually the tool thing, I have a couple of. I have a couple of blog posts on my blog that do really, really well for Lifter LMS and for WooCommerce.
[00:19:25] Melissa: They’re really big kind of, traffic drivers for us. So, I’ve just about to go and do something with the Interact, the survey people who I use Interact myself, but I also design themes around Interact. So often I’m looking for tools in my, kind of within my products or tools that I use, so tools are good people to reach out, especially if you’ve got decent rank on your site.
[00:19:43] Alex: I really love that your business, that process is ingrained so deeply directly into your business that like, I almost felt silly asking the questions just because the very way you were describing your business and the way it’s structured, it was like, oh, okay. Yeah. So then you just ask, like, it just makes perfect sense.
[00:20:01] Alex: It’s so. So clever. I love it. A lot of people I talk to, they’re like, I’m doing a lot of outreach. I’m doing a lot of SEO research and stuff like that directly looking for affiliates. But for you, it’s kind of, I’m doing the outreach, trying to get them interested in actually like promoting on my site.
[00:20:16] Alex: And then, oh, by the way, you can also have an affiliate program. This affiliate program I have, if you’re interested in that too. So cool. Love it. It’s like an upsell instead of a direct sell.
[00:20:24] Melissa: It’s the concept of borrowing other people’s audiences. So, you know, naturally people who are an authority in their subject are going to have an audience. And that’s, you know, the fastest way to increase your own audience.
[00:20:35] Alex: It seems like you have a few different archetypes of your affiliates.
[00:20:38] Alex: So you’ve got your customers and you also have your speakers. Can you tell me a little bit about kind of what the onboarding process looks like for each of them? Is it the same? Is it different? Kind of walk me through that a little
[00:20:47] Melissa: Yeah, sure. It’s completely the same actually. And I actually own other products as well. And we use the same system. It’s all done, uh, in an automated way. So by, uh, active campaign. So, uh, as soon as they register their scent, they go into our onboarding sequence where they’re introduced to different assets and then they’ll go on our list, they’ll get tagged and then they get the monthly affiliate email.
[00:21:07] Melissa: I mean, if somebody’s really performing, I’ll reach out and say, Hey, good job. It’s so good to have you on board. What can we do for you? You know, have you got, you know, if they’re converting, then I’ll say, have you got an audience who needs some content? Can I come and, repay the favor?
[00:21:19] Melissa: So I do look for people who are high performing and reach out to them.
[00:21:22] Alex: Gotcha. Okay. can you tell me a little bit about what that outreach looks like for those high performers? Because I know, um, sometimes actually plays out pretty different. it. Haha.
[00:21:31] Melissa: I’ll do it. Well, ’cause I like most people on the first of the month, I’ll go into the various, I’ll various websites and I’ll approve the PayPal mass payout for our affiliates. And I just look at who’s. Who’s leading the field. And if it’s someone I don’t know, I will send the money. And then literally five minutes later, I’ll send an email going, Hey, I’ve just had the best day ever.
[00:21:50] Melissa: Cause I got to send you X number of dollars. Thank you so much. Just wanted to send a personal thing and Hey, you know, we’d love to see what you can do. Here’s, here’s my booking link. Do you want to get on a call? Let me know, you know, what we can do for you.
[00:22:03] Alex: And again, that’s a brilliant time to do that because
[00:22:06] Melissa: Send do it. They’ve got the money. Yeah. Same
[00:22:08] Alex: Yeah, totally right. And that reciprocity that makes a lot of sense. There’s timing there. They see the money and then they see that email from you. They’re going to want to reciprocate even though you’re technically reciprocating with them by giving them that money in the first place.
[00:22:20] Alex: That’s yeah, that’s brilliant. That’s a great time to do that. I love that.
[00:22:23] Melissa: Yeah. If there’s someone who I really, really want to encourage, I will use my same go to their website video. Their website, my, my face pre recorded video tactic as well, if I really want to impress them,
[00:22:35] Alex: You’ve just kind of flipped the script on how I think about all this. Cause usually I think about it with the affiliate program forward. So I’m getting people to sign up for the affiliate program and then I’m also offering them all these different partnership opportunities with them to do video with them, to have them do video on my platform and all this stuff.
[00:22:49] Alex: You’re kind of doing it the other way around where you’re, working with them to do the video and then you’re kind of working them into the affiliate program at the same time.
[00:22:56] Melissa: I should probably be actively targeting affiliates and we should, we do, we do have a hit list, not so much in the membership, but in my other brand, we do have a list of ambassadors. We really want to land.
[00:23:06] Melissa: And we are approaching them and saying, can we build your website for enough? You know, we want them to move over from a different platform to our WordPress solution. So we are actively acquiring ambassadors and we call it ambassadors. We don’t call it affiliates and we set them up an affiliate code and we give them their own special resources.
[00:23:23] Melissa: You know, there’s some people who are just VVIP and that’s a slightly different approach over in that brand, which is different to mine.
[00:23:30] Alex: Let’s explore that a little bit more because I feel like whenever people are just getting started, that’s the kind of stuff that they really want to also focus on is trying to find a few of those. so can you tell me a little bit more about, how does that program differ?
[00:23:43] Alex: You said that you’re offering them a few other resources and stuff like that. Can you expand on that a little bit? Yeah.
[00:23:48] Melissa: it’s not really fair, but the bigger your company gets, we have an agency side, which builds website setups for people buying our themes. so we have a team who can, we can afford for them to do some freebies, some free builds or some. So for those we are looking for ambassadors who.
[00:24:05] Melissa: Highly high visibility in the photography community. You have an audience who are probably teaching have , they’ve productized something that probably not just shooting, they’re appearing at workshops, maybe they’re selling presets or some other things. And we will be actively saying, who knows these people?
[00:24:20] Melissa: Who’s met them? Who’s, how do we have a contact where we can approach them? So we, we always have an evolving list of people on our, would like to have lists. And then of course, , we can, that, we consider that marketing budget where we’re giving some of our time for free to build or, do it very cheaply, their website.
[00:24:36] Melissa: And then they’re straight on our showcase. Then we can get them, we can interview them. We can put them on our blog. We can share content around them. They’re going to share it to their audience.
[00:24:43] Alex: Talk about rolling out the red carpet. I mean, geez, you’re, straight up just saying, hey, I want to work with you and I’m going to literally solve this problem. I’m going to build this site for you. I just really want to work with your audience and have that opportunity.
[00:24:54] Alex: You’re borrowing that list. You’re leaning into that. You’re getting a great portfolio piece in the process.
[00:25:00] Alex: Are there any other things that you think that we haven’t talked about yet that you’d like to talk about?
[00:25:03] I think we have kind of touched on it briefly, but. I’m always looking for going beyond just an affiliate relationship, but by build, like, I, I know that with LifterLMS, I set out to have a relationship because I use the software for my own membership.
[00:25:18] Melissa: And I was like, this is cool. And then hard on the heels of that. I thought I’m going to build two or three themes, which feature Lifter LMS. I’m lucky that I have, you know, Like a technical side of what I do, we’re just working integration, which I can’t say who it is with someone where we’re going to build an actual integration like you have done, who have a, an audience of hundreds of thousands of photographers.
[00:25:37] When the payback, when the payoff is big enough, it’s worth, you know, doing something a little bit extraordinary or, you know, making that investment to get the big players on board. So the sooner you can find someone who is like the big domino, like the needle mover in your market, who, where the benefit to them great.
[00:25:54] Melissa: I remember speaking to Chris, I hit him at that sweet spot. No one else had made any LifterLMS themes. I was the first person to do it. , it filled a gap. That was, you know, there’s a few people doing it now, but it right in that moment, it filled a gap. So if you can kind of fill a gap that someone has, whether it’s in their content or in their product or something where you were using the two things together is better than using them separately, then that’s a great way to develop a really good relationship with someone.
[00:26:20] You had mentioned that you were the first there . It makes me think about, whenever I’m looking at integrations. Now I have some well established ones that I’m working with, but for siren. I’m competing directly with some pretty well established products that have been around in the WordPress space for a while. Affiliate marketing is almost as old as the Internet itself. To be able to establish myself in here, I have to get a little bit creative.
[00:26:38] Timing is relevant to that, I think, because, , sometimes those people can actually be up and comers as well, who are maybe just a few steps ahead of you but aren’t so far established that, that they already have other people who are doing the same thing you’re doing, connecting with them.
[00:26:54] Alex: Does that kind of align with what you were talking about with Lifter?
[00:26:57] Melissa: I’ve been a serial kind of first kind of person. I’m always looking for opportunities to be first in the markets. I did it with, I did it with Divi. I was the first person to sell, and any product that wasn’t a core part of what they offered. We’ve just recently, we did it last year with Kadence.
[00:27:11] Melissa: I think, timing is everything. So. Picking those gaps.
[00:27:14] Melissa: It’s just it’s really interesting because sometimes and I’m guilty of this as well. Sometimes people don’t necessarily understand that they’re missing something until you go to them and say, I have a product that solves a problem that your audience have, but you don’t really know about that.
[00:27:29] Melissa: We’re always coming at it from what we do is great design. We make things look pretty , and I think, a lot of the partnerships we have are with product creators, but they’re more hung up on functionality.
[00:27:39] Melissa: Whereas we’re like saying, that’s all great. That should be a given, but we’re going to help you make your thing look really beautiful. And people are like, Oh, I haven’t thought of it like that. I didn’t realize I had to make this thing beautiful or a WooCommerce interface look beautiful. So we will often help if you can help people look at their product.
[00:27:55] Melissa: If you can make their product look good, it doesn’t matter how well established they are. If you can improve their workflow or make something, make it easier to use their product, then most people will be thrilled.
[00:28:04] Melissa: It’s not always a timing gap. It can be a product gap or a workflow gap. It hasn’t hit the top of their priority
[00:28:10] Melissa: list.
[00:28:11] Alex: I think I can see that in my own experience too with, again, with the Lifter integration that it did just because, there was a gap there with creating a Udemy clone and creating a multi course platform clone, , that Lifter has a lot of capabilities to , manage multiple course creators and stuff like that, but it didn’t have a way to handle the incentive programs and no, there’s no affiliate plugin prior to Siren that could do that.
[00:28:31] Alex: I, Was able to fill that gap from a product perspective. And I also think that sometimes that actually does play right into being first. Cause I think both of those things can happen at the same time. Right.
[00:28:40] Alex: Especially if they have a gap. I mean, you’re naturally going to be first because you’re filling a gap that wasn’t filled yet.
[00:28:46] Melissa: Well, I remember going to Nick Roach who founded Elegant Themes and no one was selling any third party products at all, not, no plugins, nothing. And I wrote to him and , I said, I’ve had this idea. I already sell child themes for another platform, would you have any objection?
[00:28:58] Melissa: And he was like, Oh no, not really. If you can make it work. He was like, but why? I was like, well, did you know that photographers don’t want to use Divi? Cause you’ve got no photography website examples in any of your showcases and you’re not showing, you’re not showing how to use the galleries properly.
[00:29:11] Melissa: And I sent him a long list of things and I said, here’s an example theme that I’ve put together. He was like, Oh my God, I hadn’t even thought about that. I thought we were really photographer friendly and I said, well, you’re not so you’re going to be, but, you know, so yeah. And he was like, yeah, go for it.
[00:29:25] Melissa: And, we were very, very lucky in the right place at the right time. . And I think for us, if your market. If your audience sees that you are fighting for them, so for example we have a really close relationship with the team at Kadence and by working with them we got them to add just one little button to the gallery module where you can reverse the order of photos in a gallery, which every photographer wants because they want a chronological storytelling type blog post, and they were like, thank you, that was brilliant.
[00:29:48] Melissa: Really great feedback. It was a very easy win for them, but we get to go back to our community and say, Hey, you know, and they’re one of our biggest partners. We’re one of their key affiliates. So it’s a great, you can develop this lovely cycle, this circle of helping each other to improve. And you can be seen to be really delivering to your audience and having influence too.
[00:30:05] Melissa: I love to work closely with affiliates and sometimes we’re their affiliate and, or both or vice versa.
[00:30:10] Alex: Yeah, that’s fantastic. I love that the idea , of being able to go to bat for your audience. So you’re winning because you’re going to get, you’re getting a better product as a result, but you also get to go back to your audience and say, Hey, look, I got your back. I did this thing. I made their product better by offering the feedback from you.
[00:30:25] Alex: That’s really cool. I love that.
[00:30:26] Melissa: And they love to get on board. When we were campaigning for, just tiny things, I’m like, come on audience. I’ve submitted a feature request to move the arrows on a slider, like to down the bottom and I was like, let’s pile on and upvote it. Everyone’s like, yeah, we’re on it. You can have fun with your affiliate relationships too and the people who are in your kind of world and your community.
[00:30:42] I really appreciate you coming on the show and kind of answering these questions. Where can people find you, online?
[00:30:48] Alex: So how can people connect with you?
[00:30:50] Melissa: If you want to really kind of see behind the scenes of an established membership, you can find us at themarketingfix. co and you can get your first month free. Just kind of come and find me and reach out or get on our list and we’ll, you’ll get sent the offer. And then you can have a really good look at kind of, if you’re really into the kind of nerdy about how to do dashboards really well and like gamification and all those and how to make WordPress look really pretty.
[00:31:13] Melissa: It’s some people just join just to see, just to kind of reverse engineer how we’ve made the tech work so feel and the design works. So feel, absolutely feel free, but also do come along to one of our live sessions and say hi., the design space.co is my other brand where we sell into like.
[00:31:28] Melissa: Learning management systems integrated with all the major page builders. So you can find us there. But yeah, I also have a Facebook group as well called the Design Space Lounge, where that’s kind of a good nerdy place to hang out as well.
[00:31:39] Alex: And I will add all of those in the show notes below so that, I’ll definitely be checking them out. I have a feeling I could use some of these resources , that you’ve been curating. I think that’s a really great way to put it to you. You do a lot of curation.
[00:31:49] Alex: It sounds like you’re just kind of bringing in and finding people , and collecting them and, helping them shine. Thank you so much for your time and, , I will see you around. Thanks.
[00:31:58] Melissa: Yeah. Thanks a lot. See you soon.
[00:32:00] Alex: See ya.
[00:32:00] Alex: Thank you for joining us in this episode of Partnership, where your network is the wind in your sails. I hope you found today’s discussion insightful and inspiring. Remember, the strength of your business lies in the partnerships you build and nurture. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review.
[00:32:18] Alex: For more tips and insights, visit our website at partnership. fm. This is Alex Standiford, sailing out.
