WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
In this lesson, you will learn how
to get started on building your team of affiliates in SFI.
CHOOSING UP SIDES
When I was a kid, the boys from our
neighborhood would meet at the vacant lot on the corner every Sunday afternoon
to play ball. The first thing we would do is choose two captains for the day,
and the captains would choose up sides. The captains would take turns picking
players for their team from the ragtag group of neighborhood kids who showed up
that day. Often the outcome of the game for that day was predetermined by the
choosing of sides, due to an uneven distribution of ages, sizes, and talents.
Getting the right players on your team was very important to the outcome.
Team effort and healthy competition
among opposing teams is the most natural of things for human beings. Cut a
bunch of kids loose on a Sunday afternoon and that's what they will most likely
do: choose up teams and have a competitive game between the opposing teams. The
games may be different in different parts of the world, but the activity of
picking teams and playing some sort of competitive game is universal.
When you join the SFI affiliate
program, you have two ways to advance your business:
1) Build your team of affiliates
2) Market products from the Website
2) Market products from the Website
While you can do both
simultaneously, the question arises as to which of these two tasks should be
given priority. The answer for SFI is to first focus on expanding your team of
affiliates. Like the kids at the neighborhood vacant lot, most ventures
naturally begin by picking your team. In SFI, like any venture, picking the
right team can be the most important part of obtaining a successful outcome.
Picking your team might not be your
first priority if you were solely responsible for training the affiliates you
bring into your team. In SFI, the training is allocated to the Team Leaders and
Group Leaders, who already have the experience and proven track record. Were
that not the case, it would be necessary for you to gain experience in Internet
marketing of the products before bringing in new affiliates who would depend on
you for training. After all, no one makes any commissions until products are
sold. But since experienced Team Leaders and Group Leaders are available to
train your new affiliates, you can follow the natural order of things and focus
first on building a great team of affiliates.
ONE BAD APPLE DOES NOT SPOIL THE BARREL
In many ventures, whether those
ventures involve sports or business, picking one bad apple on your team can
often cause problems and interfere with the overall success of the team. (The
scrawniest kid with the thickest glasses was always the last one to be picked
in our neighborhood ballgames.) The careful design of the SFI program, however,
substantially eliminates this risk. SFI has "full compression" in its
multitier pay plan. That is, there can be hundreds of inactive affiliates
between you and the next member, and the next member in line will still be
considered to be on your next level for purposes of the pay plan. Thus, while
you definitely want good, motivated affiliates on your team, you do not have to
worry about excluding the bad ones in the process of finding the good ones.
This said, however, you want to make an effort to find and recruit good team
players.
FINDING THE GOOD ONES
When you are first getting started
in SFI, you will want to hand pick several good affiliates to start your team.
This activity comes naturally and does not require a lot of technical training.
Even if you know very little about Internet marketing, you can begin to succeed
immediately by finding and recruiting good quality affiliates. The remainder of
this lesson will outline the simple steps for you to follow in order to
accomplish this task.
PUT YOURSELF IN THE SHOES OF THE ONES YOU WANT TO RECRUIT
As discussed in an earlier lesson,
you should always focus on the perspective of your potential recruits. Put
yourself in their shoes. Think like they will be thinking.
First, you should spend some time
thinking about what qualities you want in your affiliates. What are the
characteristics of the new affiliates that you would want on your team? You
probably want people who enjoy a good challenge and are willing to become
involved in new things and learn new ways to increase their income. You should
want people who are capable of critical thinking, but also capable of taking
practical, effective action. You also want to find some people who already know
a good deal about Internet marketing. People who already have a good Website
that draws substantial traffic would be great to have on your team. Ask
yourself, "What would these people search for on the search engines when
looking for new and better ways to make money on the Internet?" Come up
with a list of words and phrases with which they would likely search.
I cannot offer you any example
search words or phrases. In order for this to work, you have to come up with
your own search terms. If I or anyone writing about Internet promotion to a
large audience were to give a specific list of words with which you should
search, several thousand people would wind up at the same Websites and those
poor Webmasters would be inundated with queries. Originality is what makes this
work. You have to be original and come up with your own search terms for this
to work for any of you. This is your chance to use your own imagination and
creativity to rise above the crowd by finding those choice spots to advertise.
You do this by carefully thinking out the search terms your targeted recruits
would likely use.
When you have come up with your list
of search terms, go to the popular search engines (Yahoo!, AltaVista,
WebCrawler, Google, etc.) and perform a search with the terms on your list. The
sites that show up on the first three pages of your search engine results would
likely be the sites also discovered by the people you want to be on your team.
If these are personal sites, rather than large, corporate venture-capital type
sites, the Webmasters of these sites themselves would be a great addition to
your team! Thus, you want to inquire both about advertising on the site and
recruiting the Webmaster as well.
MAKING CONTACT
Any time you start to contact
someone over the Internet regarding a commercial matter, be very careful not to
spam. Thus, you must be careful how you contact the Webmasters of the sites
that turned up in your search. If a site in which you have become interested
allows free postings such as classifieds or announcements, you have hit pay
dirt—but read the rules for posting on the site very carefully before posting
and follow the rules! The next thing you would look for is contact information
for the Webmaster. If there is a phone number listed, you have also hit pay
dirt. You can call the Webmaster on the telephone without any worries of a spam
complaint. In your phone conversation with the Webmaster, explain that he or
she has a Website you believe could help you recruit a team of affiliates for
SFI. If you have an advertising budget, tell them that you would like to
purchase some advertising on their site. (Don't say this if you can not afford
any advertising because you do not want to be misleading.) Explain further,
however, that they can doubly profit from this if they will also join SFI. Tell
them that they can join as an affiliate for free, and all of the recruits you
obtain from advertising on their Website will also fall under them. Thus, they
will profit twice from selling you some advertising.
If the Website on which you arrange
to advertise this way is productive, the Webmaster will see all of the
affiliates coming into the network and will soon get the idea. The Webmaster
will likely start promoting on the site with his or her own affiliate number.
Then you will not have to pay for advertising on that site anymore and yet it
is still building your team.
If you cannot afford any paid
advertising, you will have a somewhat more difficult task. Webmasters get very
interested in speaking with someone who is offering to pay them for advertising
on their Website. Most people who have worked to build a good Website and build
good traffic to it have planned on making their money through paid advertising.
On the other hand, they will not be terribly receptive to using space on their
sites for an affiliate program with which they are not familiar. Nevertheless,
a polite phone call in which you give them your Gateway URL for the affiliate
program (www.YourGateway.com/YourSFIID/FREE/) and a brief mention that there
are presently over 7 million affiliates, some of which are earning over $10,000
per month with this program, may well get their attention.
If there is not a phone number for
the Webmaster on the Website, but only an e-mail address, you will have to be
careful that your e-mail does not give the appearance of being spam. Remember
that even if your message is technically not spam, a recipient who erroneously
believes that it is spam may well report you anyway and cause big problems for
you. All Webmasters who list their e-mail address on their Website get a lot of
spam and are, consequently, quite annoyed by it. The reason that happens is
that the people who harvest e-mail addresses for the spammers get those e-mail
addresses with software which searches Web pages and grabs any e-mail addresses
listed. Thus, anyone who has had a Web page with their e-mail address on it up
for any length of time is already on these lists and is being bombarded with
spam. Most of those spam messages begin with "I was looking at your
Website . . ." In almost every case, it becomes immediately apparent that
the spammer has never seen your Web page. They are clearly lying and that makes
you mad right from the start. Thus, whenever you send e-mail to a Webmaster,
you must make it clear from the beginning of the message that you have truly
just visited their Website and are responding to the e-mail contact link you
found there. You must make it clear that this is a single message (not bulk)
sent only to that Webmaster. Something very important to realize is that you
can not make these things clear simply by asserting them in the e-mail. Spam
e-mails that Webmasters get daily boldly (albeit falsely) assert that they are
not spam. Thus, you have to PROVE that you were just looking at the Webmaster's
Website by mentioning very specific things about their site right up front.
Otherwise, you will not only lose their attention, but they will likely report
you for spam.
Because you are responding to a
Contact Us link on their Website with a single, non-bulk e-mail, you are not
technically spamming them. By placing that link on their Website, they have
given you permission to send them a one-time personal, non-bulk e-mail
pertaining to their Website. And if they recognize your e-mail as being honest
and sincere and recognize that you have indeed spent some time at their
Website, they will welcome your correspondence. It is important that the
subject heading and the first sentence of your e-mail reference something that
could only be known from having seen the Website. Mentioning the domain name
itself is not convincing because the spammers know that as well, but it does
help to mention it. Mentioning the color scheme, the graphics, and some of the
advertisers or information on the site will be convincing—if you are very
accurate. The more you talk about the Website with specific and accurate
information, the more the Webmaster will be intrigued by your e-mail. You need
to be complimentary and not critical of the site, of course. People love
compliments. Your e-mail should not sound like an ad, but should sound like
personal correspondence from someone who became excited from visiting their
Website. In your first e-mail, do not mention the SFI affiliate program by name,
but rather make a general inquiry about advertising on their site for your
business. (If you cannot afford paid advertising, just make a general inquiry
as to whether they would be interested in an affiliate program that would work
well on their site.) After they respond with interest, it is appropriate for
you to reveal the nature of your business. As discussed earlier regarding the
phone call, explain that the Webmaster can doubly profit from selling you
advertising and becoming an affiliate. Add that that there is no charge or
obligation for becoming an SFI affiliate.
CONCLUSION
With the process outlined in this
lesson, anyone, regardless of their technical knowledge of Internet marketing,
can begin immediately to build a successful team of SFI affiliates. By
following the steps which have been outlined here, you can find appropriate
Websites and, through free or paid advertising, place on these sites the
SFI-approved banners or textual ads provided for this purpose. If you have a
bit of luck, you will find a few Webmasters who will also join as SFI
affiliates. Just like playing ball on the corner lot, I think you will find
building your SFI team to come naturally and to be a lot of fun!
WHAT'S COMING NEXT
Our next lesson will touch on the
basics of designing a Website that you can use as a doorway page to help build
your SFI business.
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