‘Self-replication’ sounds like science fiction but it’s not. It has nothing to do with cloning, in a biological sense. What I’m writing about here is a third and very important step of affiliate or multi-level marketing.
If you sell products retail or by commission, your sales are one time but, of course, you hope that you will have repeat customers. This involves good product quality and good customer support.
Anything that involves recruiting or sign-ups requires this third step of duplicating what you have done. What have you done?
Step one, you have started. You have selected the affiliate programs you want to make money with. Step two, you have advertised and gotten some sign-ups under you.
Great, but really you are still in the starting stage. The real work is just beginning. If you fail to contact your new sign-ups, chances are you will lose a good percentage of them in a few short weeks or months.
The internet is full of ‘tire kickers’ and ‘lookers’ who will move right on to the next thing, if something doesn’t automatically happen overnight with whatever they’ve just signed-up for.
You must seize your window of opportunity to contact them and try to make converts out of them. First, welcome them as part of your team. Congratulate them on the smart decision they have made in signing-up.
You must try to ‘light a fire’ under them and get them excited about the benefits they will get and the profits they will make by working your program. Relate to them whatever successes you have had. If you are new to the program yourself and have not made a lot of sales yet, don’t be intimidated! Don’t make a bunch of stuff up, though.
Do a little research with your own program. Somewhere they will tell you what the sales potentials are and you can use this information in your pitch.
Most importantly, offer to help them out and give them whatever sales tips or information has worked for you. Your success depends on their success. Lastly, stress to them the importance of sharing this information with their own sign-ups.
Remember; your success depends on this relationship that you build with others!
Brian Beshore has been involved with Internet Marketing for several years. He publishes his own Home Business Guide.
http://www.surfinsafari.net
What I am about to say will make some people stand up and shout “hooray!” It will make others blush with embarrassment. Either way, take this advice and make your life a little bit easier.
This is about email etiquette. When you are exchanging emails with friends and family, do whatever you want. But when you are conducting business, either as the customer or as the merchant, you need to observe some common rules.
First, I am constantly amazed, on a daily basis, how many people will send me an email without signing their name! C’mon! If you send me an email without signing your name, my first impression of you is “LAZY BUM.” Right or wrong, that’s what you project if you don’t bother to sign your name. It’s a common courtesy to sign your full name.
Here is the rule: If it’s worth sending, it’s worth signing.
This is just like writing a paper letter to a company. You should tell them who you are. Always sign your first and last name.
I got an email the other day from a customer that had NO name at all, and all it said was…
“i lost my psswrd”
That’s it! How lazy is that? That’s all it said. No name, no contact information. After spending a few minutes checking my database (grrrrr), the email was not on file. In other words, they were contacting me now with a different email address then they signed up with and they were too lazy to tell me who they were. How can I help this person?
So I had to email the person back and start trying to extract basic information out of them so I could help them. It was like pulling teeth. This is really irritating. And get 10 or 20 of these a day and it becomes a gigantic pain in the you-know-what. You will soon understand this when you get an email from one of your own customers who needs the download link for your ebook again because they lost the link. Hey, we all lose links and info from time to time. However, an email that says “pls send link” with no name or contact details doesn’t cut it. You’ve got to know who they are first in order to help them. So make sure when you contact people in a business setting that you do so properly. You will save them and YOU some valuable time.
Second, do not leave the subject line of your emails blank. Not only does it look like SPAM, and some people won’t even bother to read it, but it makes you look LAZY! Put a subject line in your emails.
Third, get rid of that silly background color, flowers, smiley faces, pictures and all that other junk. Many email services block those pictures now anyway, mine does. Oh, and that beautiful email you think you are sending shows up as bunch of ugly boxes with red X’s in them. I even get emails where people have brown writing on a black background. What were they thinking? I can’t even read the darn things and have to copy and paste it into Microsoft Word to even figure out what their email is saying. Just a white background and black letters is fine, thank you.
In a world where common courtesies seem to be going down the drain, take some pride and be one of the people who project a smart, professional image. Not only will it make you look better, but it will save you time and energy.
Copyright 2006 Jeff Yancey
Jeff Yancey is the author of The Pegasus Formula: How To Create A Perpetual Traffic Generator and Get Lots of Real Traffic To Your Website located at http://www.pegasusformula.com
