You ask some questions that are hard to answer.

SFI Marketing Group was founded by Gery Carson over a decade ago. You can learn a lot more about the company if you search for “What is SFI Marketing Group” on Google.

Essentially, it’s a multi-level marketing company that sells some of its own products and which has created it’s own store for selling those products. The store also allows individuals to sell products of their own and will be introducing more retailers in the future.

Affiliates can earn commissions in a number of ways.

As far as the honest potential of being an affiliate, that’s an impossible question to answer.

Most affiliates never earn anything, and that is more of an indication of their lack of marketing skills than a reflection of the products they promote. At least, that’s my opinion.

Of the 5% to 10% of affiliates who do earn incomes, their revenues can range from a few dollars per month to thousands of dollars per year, and there is no way for me to predict the potential earnings for someone I don’t know.

Even if I do know someone, their potential for earning is based on many factors and I would not be willing to make any predictions.

I also think that there are legal restrictions regarding predicting earnings through affiliate and network marketing companies, but I’m not entirely sure of that.

You can learn more about MLM from the FTC website:

Multilevel Marketing Plans

As far as I know, SFI follows all the rules and is a legal company. I have had good experiences with them for about seven years and always get paid what I earned.

Unfortunately, the payment I’ve received has not been enough to compensate me for the effort I’ve put into it.

That’s why I’m not actively promoting them right now.

Act on your dream!

JD

It’s nice to meet you, too.

I agree with you about PurJava and the Veriuni natural cleaners. In my experience, they are great products.

I do not have conversion statistics to share. Even if I told you my statistics, or you read what someone else was doing, it would be of very little use to you.

Each of us advertises and promotes differently, so our statistics can diverge greatly from others promoting the same thing.

I will say this. If I had to feed myself based on commissions received from selling those products – even though I really like them – I’d be a much skinnier person, if I were still alive.

In order to make a good income from promoting just those products, you’d have to sell hundreds per month, and that’s very hard to do. I know that I can’t do it.

Maybe some people can, I really don’t know.

That’s why it’s so important to diversify and not put all our eggs in one basket. By having multiple streams of income from different categories, our income isn’t as likely to suffer across the board as it would be with only a few sources of income.

It’s also important not to spread ourselves too thin by trying to promote too many things. That leads to confusion and the inability to keep current with everything.

There is an art to finding the proper range that works for each of us.

However, I and many others learned the hard way last fall that world economic conditions can change very rapidly and it isn’t something that we have much control over.

Some of my income streams have dried completely. Others have diminished. A few are still coming in, but not like they were a year ago.

Maybe they’ll recover in another year or so.

Act on your dream!

JD

I got a lot of experience and learned how to do some things that I’ll use in the future, but in different ways.

So, even though I lost time and money, I gained knowledge and experience, both of which – I believe – are necessary for future success.

JD

I’m starting to think like you when it comes to MLM. I don’t quite hate it, but I don’t see the potential that I thought was there a few years ago.

Affiliate marketing is getting harder. There’s a lot more competition and too many not-worth-buying products and services. The more everyone promotes, the more blind we all become to the ads.

Even for the good products, affiliate marketing isn’t working the way it did a few years ago.

For example, I used to earn pretty good checks from Amazon.com, when it was new and most folks weren’t sure about buying anything online. So, their thousands of affiliates, including me, paid for all their advertising and helped them build their brand name.

Now, everyone – just about – knows Amazon.com and can go there directly to shop. Most of us who continue to promote them and the products that can be bought there are seeing diminishing returns on our efforts.

Affiliate marketing – more and more – requires good niches to make a good income. For example, on the radio interview you did, you talked about someone with a passion for hydroponic gardening who was earning a pretty good amount by constantly blogging about hydroponics and was selling the products she used and recommended.

That’s a good example of a site selling to people who want to buy. There probably isn’t a lot of competition in that niche, at least not when compared to some of the things we’re doing.

Squidoo has some really nice features that aren’t easily available elsewhere. For example, in the situation I mentioned, I was using a WordPress blog to post Nice Offers coupons, and I was using it as both an RSS feed generator and a database program, more than a blog.

I had a category for the month the coupons expired, another category for every state and province in the US and Canada, and other categories based on the business category of the advertiser.

I would get the new offers from the Nice Offers site, repost them with my affiliate code to my blog, and it would automatically rebuild all those RSS feeds. (I’m sure you know that WordPress creates a feed for each category, in addition to the main RSS feed.)

Those Squidoo lenses (one per state and province) were ranking well in Google and the offers were getting found there. Plus, I was signing up businesses who wanted to advertise their products.

It took a long time to set all of that up.

Then the rug was pulled out from under me.

In that particular case, it would have made no difference if I’d done it all using SBI or any other set of tools.

With no way to monetize what I’d been doing, and no way to switch to something comparable, the only choice was to shut it down, lick my wounds, sulk awhile, and start over with something else.

The other side of your question, if I’m reading it correctly, is whether I would have been better off building SBI sites in other niches. Yes, I’m sure I would have. But, even then, if the monetization model that pays for the site changes and there is no way to remonetize, then it’s a lost cause.

That’s why it’s so important to pick niches where there is relatively high demand, relatively low competition, and which attracts people who want to learn more about the topic and are inclined to buy on a regular basis.

If I were better at doing that, I’d be earning more now.

However, as we’ve discussed in the past, I’m not one of those people who can build a site just to make money. It has to be something I am really interested in, or it just isn’t worth doing.

One of the things I’m really interested in, for example, is helping small business owners promote their products and services online, and that’s why I’m in the process of building a new SBI-powered site to do that. I know how to get them found for what they’re offering and know how to put the tools to work. We’ll see if they see the potential and are willing to pay for it.

Good luck with the stop smoking site. I’m happy that I quit smoking many years ago.

Act on your dream!

JD

I’ll talk about network marketing first. I hate it with a passion. I’m not necessarily a loner, but I hate the idea that my income is dependent upon getting other people to sign up under me, and then to hopefully keep that kind of thing going. No sir, I know that’s going to end at some point, and like you, I don’t want to have to babysit anyone else for my income.

Affiliate marketing seems like the way to go, but I just don’t seem to have the promotion thing going at all. I know I’m missing something big or small; I’m not sure which it is. But if I could just turn that one corner, I’d be on my way.

I can’t comment on the other thing, SFI itself, but I will say this. You built all those Squidoo lenses, which hasn’t interested me, for someone else, in a way, and I’m wondering if right now you’d be feeling better about it all if you’d use your SiteBuildIt stuff to build websites, which are pretty much always there and totally yours. Then again, I don’t know much about them either, so I’m not sure if you’d like going that route.

Obviously you see part of what I’m trying to do. If my new site starts generating any real income, then I’ll know that’s the route to go. We’ll see.
[rq=1140,1,blog][/rq]Smoke Not So Much

(I’m not sure. Is Ade your first name, or is it Ina as shown on your Blogger profile page?)

I see that your last blog posting is about PurJava. I like that product and it makes a nice, smooth cup of coffee easily when a coffee maker isn’t available.

I also found that it made a nice coffee-flavored ice cream when mixed with vanilla ice cream.

Welcome to our discussions.

Act on your dream!

JD

(I prefer talking to people with real names and I don’t know yours, so I’m abbreviating your keyword.)

Thank you for your comment. Welcome to our discussions.

Act on your dream!

JD

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