| Dear Internet visitor,
My intention is
to help you own a profitable Internet
Home Business.
Here is
Internet Home Business course that will help and guide
you to start off your Home Business on the Internet.
Lesson #7
BUILDING YOUR TEAM OF
AFFILIATES
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
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.
by George Little
Copyright (year) Panhandle On-Line, Inc.
License granted to Carson Services, Inc. for
distribution to SFI affiliates. No part of this work may
be republished, redistributed, or sold without written
permission of the author.
For more information on the Internet Income
Course and other works and courses by George Little, see
www.profitpropulsion.com.
For Web Hosting services specially designed for
SFI affiliates, see www.profitpropulsion.com.
Continue To Next Lesson
>>>
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