I have mixed feelings about SFI Marketing Group

June 8, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 12 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Network Marketing, SFI Marketing Group 

This is difficult for me to write. In fact, I’ve been thinking about it for over a week and didn’t really know how to approach it, so I decided to just start writing about it and hope that I can sort out my feelings with the help of some of my friends.

I am really conflicted about SFI Marketing Group.

(Update August 2009: Affiliate links removed, as I no longer promote SFI Marketing Group.)

I’ve been an affiliate with SFI since late 2002. I’ve put a lot of work into promoting the company and products, despite all the changes – some of which made months of work obsolete.

That’s one of the downsides. They’ve changed direction several times over the years, but – for the most part – I think they made the right decisions, even though some of them were particularly bothersome for me.

For example, I spent months promoting NiceOffers and had a pretty good thing going. But, when the program was put on hold, I was stuck with a complex blog, about 50 Squidoo lenses, and I don’t know how many promotions that were suddenly obsolete.

What could I do?

I took down the blog, deleted or converted the Squidoo lenses, and moved on – though not with the same enthusiasm I had before this happened.

This was about the time that the CEO of SFI, Gery Carson, announced that they would be opening the TripleClicks store to sell their products and to make it easy for people around the world to sell their own products.

The store was months away, but it did open and, despite some early flaws, has improved over time. Now, there are thousands of items on sale there.

In some ways, I think of the store as a different kind of eBay. There are lots of people promoting the store, so that means a lot of traffic. The current Alexa ranking is just under 34,000, so that’s a pretty good indication that they are receiving lots of people on the site.

I don’t have any information about how well the products are selling, however.

Still, even though it is taking a long time, the store is progressing and seems to be living up to the promises of several months ago.

Most of the products in the store are either SFI’s own products or products being sold by private sellers. There are quite a few other items in the store and I don’t really know how they fit this picture.

Eventually, the TripleClicks store will have more retailers offering their products, but I don’t have a timetable for that.

You see, this is part of the problem. There is so much uncertainty around everything that it is hard to know what to do to generate sales.

I like some of SFI’s products, but I’m not too wild about others.

I was a member of the International Association of Home Business Entrepreneurs (IAHBE) since it opened, but I canceled my membership last month. I realized that I wasn’t spending nearly as much time on the site as I used to and I haven’t been taking advantage of their free books and free magazine subscriptions as I used to. (The books and magazines are free, but you do have to pay a small processing fee.)

So, without this subscription to IAHBE (called a standing order), I may, or may not, remain an EA (executive affiliate) with SFI in the future. This is a major change for me.

For years I was MIQ (multi-income qualified) before they changed that to EA. I’ve been either a team leader or EA ever since, until this month.

Why did I make this change?

Primarily it was because my income from affiliate marketing has plunged since last September, although it is showing signs of starting to grow again. I went from earning a pretty good income from all the businesses I promoted to earning between 25% – 35% of that amount, practically overnight.

After having that kind of revenue decline, I had to make some hard choices to protect my cash flow. So, I canceled everything that wasn’t critical to my marketing. Hopefully, my cashflow will rise again and I’ll be able to restart some of the things I dropped over the last couple of months.

On the other hand, I’m using this as an opportunity to re-examine what I’ve been doing and I’m making some big changes to my business plan.

I am not a fan of MLM (network marketing).

While I like the theory of multi-level marketing, the reality does not match the promise.

Over the years, I’ve introduced hundreds of people to SFI, but the great majority of them never did anything that I could see. There were a few who worked hard for awhile, but eventually they all slowed and stopped.

Some joined and were never communicative.

Now, I’m not going to blame all of them. It’s not that simple.

People sign up for affiliate and network marketing opportunities because it looks like easy money. It’s not. It takes a lot of work and creativity to earn decent income through online marketing.

Some people find it much easier than others. Some find it so confusing that they never really get started.

I’m somewhere in the middle. I’m too stubborn to give up, but I find a lot of inconsistencies and some things still confuse me.

I also find that I’m getting much “pickier” when it comes to what I’ll promote. I promoted lots of things a few years ago – when I was first learning – that I would not promote now.

This year, I’m pruning back even more. If I am not a happy customer of the products and services a company provides, I’m not marketing for them.

So, what do I buy from SFI?

I really like IAHBE, but it doesn’t offer the value for me that it once did. I like their non-toxic cleaning products, especially the orange cleaner and all-purpose cleaner. They are inexpensive and work very well.

Some of their other products are over priced, in my opinion. Even though I could earn a good commission when someone purchases them, I’m not comfortable with promoting them.

This brings us back to an earlier discussion on this site that related to reviews and personal recommendations.

I’m looking at my marketing efforts less as advertising and more as personal recommendations these days.

That’s a big change in how I see all of this and it’s the main reason I’m re-examining all I’ve been doing.

(I’m so far behind on getting things done that I have several websites that are sadly neglected, out of date, and need to be revised. Sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day or enough energy to do all that needs doing.)

I’m rambling. Let’s get back on topic…

I’m not a fan of network marketing. The idea of leverage sounds really good, but the idea of easy duplication by hundreds or thousands of people in your downline rarely ever develops.

In my experience, there is a lot of churn. People sign up, people quit. It’s an endless cycle.

I’m going to accept my part of the responsibility for this.

I am not a social person. I’m not a team builder. I’ve tried, but it just isn’t part of my personality.

I’m a loner who prefers to work by himself and get paid for his own efforts. That’s why I like affiliate marketing better than network marketing. I can accomplish much more in the same amount of time by talking directly to prospective buyers than I can trying to build a network.

So, MLM just isn’t for me.

Now that I’ve realized that, is it worth my time to promote SFI and TripleClicks.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that I’ve been getting checks from SFI just about every month for years. Some have been large and some have been small. I made a profit most months, broke about even some, and lost a small amount a few times. Overall, it has been a profitable venture.

But, profitable and worth doing are two different things.

I’m getting tired of working hard for meager pay from some companies. With SFI, the pay I receive from my downline’s efforts has been meager. On the other hand, the commissions I receive from sales to non-affiliates have been excellent.

Therein lies the dilemma.

So, now I’ll respond to people in my downline who contact me and I’ll give them my best advice, but I’m not going to tell anyone that it’s easy to earn a full-time income from online marketing.

Some people do very well, some never earn anything.

I’ve been lucky in that I have earned enough to meet my needs and to have some additional spending money left over. So, I consider that a successful venture. On the other hand, I could earn a lot more if I went back to full-time consulting or got a good job.

So, this year, I’m combining the two. I’ll continue affiliate marketing, but I’m also doing consulting in the real face-to-face 3D world. I’m hoping the combination will be more successful, and I’ll still be able to do most of my work from home.

So, I’m going to continue doing limited promotions for SFI and some of their products, but not to the extent I did in the past.

I’m not going to quit, because I really think Gery Carson is doing all he can to make the company more successful for its affiliates, but it’s an uphill climb.

I also don’t believe in quitting. Once I start something, I’m stubborn enough that I’ll face the difficulties, weather the storms, and find a way to solve any problems I encounter.

Whether that’s a good thing or not is debatable.

So that’s a long overview of some of my thinking on this topic.

I’m planning to revisit this topic later this week and address specific things rather than repeating this rambling monologue.

I would love to hear your opinions on affiliate marketing, network marketing, SFI Marketing Group, and similar topics.

Share your experiences and thoughts and maybe this will develop into a good discussion.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Are traffic exchanges worth your time?

March 25, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 13 Comments
Filed under: Advertising, Affiliate Funnel, Downline Builders, Soaring4Traffic, Squidoo Lenses, Traffic Exchanges 

For the last several years, I’ve spent quite a bit of time joining, using, and evaluating various ways to promote the products that enable me to earn a living as an affiliate marketer.

Among the things I’ve tried are traffic exchanges and downline builders.

I got to thinking about this earlier today as I was revising a couple of my Squidoo lenses: traffic exchanges and downline builders.

It seems that some people have strong opinions about them, both positively and negatively. Some are well-informed, others aren’t.

I’m somewhere in the middle. I think traffic exchanges have their pros and cons. I’m neither a fan, nor an opponent, of them.

Let’s look at a couple of things quickly, just to get the ball rolling.

What is a traffic exchange?

The simple answer: You look at my site and I’ll look at yours.

That may have been true a few years ago, but no longer accurately reflects the changes and innovations they have undergone.

Now, I think of them mostly as advertising sites.

I don’t try to show my websites on a traffic exchange. Instead, I try to promote myself and make an impression (hopefully positive) on the people surfing the exchanges. That’s one of the reasons I use the photo holding the steel rose. I’ve been told more than one time that it stands out.

Whether that adds to my professionalism or detracts from it is a different discussion.

Still, people remember that picture and recognize me on other sites as a result.

So, I’m promoting my personal brand.

Secondly, instead of showing my sites, I promote using fast-loading splash pages with the goal of getting someone to click the link and go to another site where we can build a relationship and maybe work together down the road.

Truthfully, I’m not doing as well at that as I should be doing.

I know what needs to be done, but haven’t gotten around to doing it yet.

For the last couple of years, as Mom’s health declined and I spent more time caring for her, there were many days when I was just too tired to do anything that required much work or creative thinking.

However, surfing the traffic exchanges was something I could do, and I actually enjoy seeing what others are promoting and then deciding for myself what I think about them – both the product or service and the person doing the promotion.

Since I still wasn’t all that sure what I wanted to promote on the traffic exchanges, I spent most of my time building downlines.

What’s a downline?

I’m not sure, but I think this term comes to us from the multi-level marketing business. Also known as MLM and network marketing.

The idea is that you get paid for making sales of your own to people who are not involved in the particular company and you get a smaller commission on sales made by the people you “sponsor” into the company.

In other words, your efforts are divided between selling products and services yourself, and building a team of others to do the same thing.

This is called leverage.

In actuality, for most of us, it becomes a time sink that does not produce the results we want.

I’m not very interested in MLMs and I only promote two of them. I’m in the process of deciding whether I want to continue with either of them and will make that decision by my birthday on July 1.

I won’t link to either of them in this post, because I don’t want to get side-tracked.

So, a downline is a group of people you have sponsored, plus the people they have sponsored, going down some number of levels as determined by the company.

Let’s move away from thinking about MLMs and downlines and turn our attention to traffic exchanges and downlines.

Do you have to build a downline in a traffic exchange?

Of course not.

You can spend your time surfing and reap the benefits of your own efforts.

Or, you can introduce others to the traffic exchanges that work best for you and help them get results, too.

I seem to be much better at introducing people and persuading them to join than I am at helping them get results. I’m not proud of this and it’s something I’m working to change.

Why spend the time and effort to sponsor someone in a traffic exchange?

There are a couple of reasons.

In most traffic exchanges, you become an affiliate and can earn commissions from any purchase made by the people you sponsor. I regularly get commissions from several traffic exchanges, and the people who sponsored me are also earning commissions based on my purchases.

In addition to monetary commissions, I also earn credits based on some percentage of the pages the people in my downline surf at that exchange. The more people in my downline and the more pages they surf, the more credits I earn.

These credits can be applied to showing websites (or preferably splash pages or squeeze pages), banner ads, and text ads.

In other words, the more people I sponsor, and the more pages all of us surf, the more advertising I can do on the site.

Of course, that applies to the people in my upline as well as any of the people in my downline. Each of us has the same opportunity to build our network of people and gain the benefit of the work we all do. When I spend time surfing, the people in my upline earn credits, too.

But, will the people who see our sites read them and click on the links?

Now, there’s the crux of the issue.

If you are showing your website or blog – especially if they take a long time to load – you’re probably wasting your time with traffic exchanges.

Years ago, that was the whole point: showing your website to someone. I’d show you my website and you’d show me yours.

That has changed over the years.

Traffic exchanges now have timers that frequently run under ten seconds, and only a few now require you to look at a site for 20 or 30 seconds before you can click on the next page.

If you have multiple links or an involved page, it will rarely be read and you can’t depend upon anyone clicking on any of your links.

Well what’s the point, then?

The days of putting up websites and/or blogs and making easy sales as an affiliate are pretty much over. Sure, you can earn some money doing it – maybe even a few hundred dollars per month – but you really can’t build a business just by doing this.

Now, you have to build a sales funnel and carefully plan your marketing activities.

Traffic exchanges no longer lead to direct sales – they are just part of the picture.

Think of a funnel.

There is a large opening at the top and a smaller opening at the bottom.

Traffic exchanges have their place at the top of the funnel. Sales take place somewhere between the top and bottom of the funnel.

The conversion percentage for any given offer you show on a traffic exchange is rather low, and can be very low for banner and text ads. So, to make it worthwhile, you have to show not just a few dozen views, but thousands per month.

That’s why most of the exchanges (all that I know of) have the option of paying to upgrade. With most upgrades, you get several hundred credits, which means that you can show your ads (splash or squeeze pages) by buying them rather than surfing for them.

Additionally, most of the traffic exchanges offer credits for sale. So, if you have an offer that converts well enough to earn a profit from it, you can theoretically buy as many credits as your budget allows and continue to grow your business until the offer no longer converts at that level. When it becomes unprofitable, it’s time to change the offer.

So, now, we’re entering a completely different type of marketing.

The savvy marketers use the traffic exchanges to introduce themselves to the surfers and offer something in exchange for a valuable item: the email address of someone who is interested in what you offer and permission to contact them using that address.

Instead of trying to make the sale directly, the goal is to have someone sign up to your mailing list. All reputable marketers who do this use some form of autoresponder service to manage the emails and comply with the CAN-SPAM laws.

When someone opts in to receiving your autoresponder series and/or newsletter and/or blog post updates via email, you now have not just one opportunity to make the sale, but multiple opportunities to build a relationship, pass along useful information, and hopefully make a few sales down the line.

If you do it right, you can meet hundreds or thousands of people who value your opinions and the information you pass along. Offer good information and many of them will look forward to hearing from you.

On the other hand, if you do nothing but sell, sell, sell and think of them in terms of email addresses with credit cards, then you’ll fail, fail, fail.

We are people and if you respect us and help us get what we are wanting, we’ll be happy to hear from you.

If you disrespect us or take us for granted or don’t do what you promised when we gave you our email address, then we’ll click on that link at the bottom of your messages and unsubscribe from your list.

So, it’s a two-way street. We’re building a relationship, and that takes time and real effort.

Also, as you know from in-person relationships, some are long-term and others are quite short. We may meet you on your splash page and get one impression, but learn to know you better on your mailing list and see a completely different person.

Perhaps we’ll grow to like you better or we may learn that you don’t offer as much as we originally expected.

Effective marketers build a list.

The people who don’t do well with traffic exchanges are those who try to do direct marketing through them.

The people who may do well are the ones who use traffic exchanges to meet new people and build a relationship over time.

I understand this and appreciate it. In fact, I’ve subscribed to hundreds of mailing lists over the last few years, and continue to subscribe to twenty or thirty that I look forward to reading. In this case, I’m also including blogs that I can subscribe to via email.

What I don’t do as well as I plan to do is to write newsletters on a regular basis and share what I have learned with others who are interested in the same things.

I’ve taken a lot of steps in moving in that direction. I have built a couple of forums that are ready for user participation. I have a couple of social networking communities in place, as well.

I have an Aweber account to manage my mailing lists and I’ve learned how to use it.

Now, I just need to focus on building my lists, and keeping each of them focused on the information I promise when someone subscribes, and providing a place where my readers can interact with me and other readers.

To do this, I’ve had to change a lot of things I was doing so I can move in the right direction.

This blog is one example. I moved it from its old site to a new domain and now it’s powered by WordPress, which makes it much easier to manage the discussions that build as you comment on what I write about.

Other examples include static websites that I’m rebuilding over time. When I first built them, I didn’t know all that I know now and they aren’t built to be part of my marketing funnel.

So, as I have time and energy, I’m converting them into sites that offer good information and each page will also be rewritten to invite the readers to respond to one offer.

It takes a lot of time and effort to do this correctly, but I’m convinced that it’s the way successful affiliate marketers, and network marketers for that matter, will continue to be successful in the future.

It’s hard enough to get someone to visit a site, let alone purchase something on the very first visit.

It’s much easier to offer free information to a first time visitor in return for subscribing to a list. Even if the conversion (subscription) ratio isn’t all that high, it’s still better than trying to sell when you first meet.

I still have a lot to learn, and even more to implement, but I’m making the effort to do so. Are you?

In some ways, bright people who are new to online marketing will have it a bit easier – if they follow the good advice that is out there. Learn how to build a marketing funnel, focus your efforts, and do what you say you’re going to do.

When someone signs up to your list, help them learn what you originally promised.

I wish I’d known that when I first started online marketing way back in the 20th century.

I’ll say this. If you don’t want to be part of the internet marketing niche, then it is probably true that traffic exchanges are a waste of time, because you’re not advertising to the right people.

If you work in a different niche, then you’ll need to find a way to attract other people who are interested in that niche. Probably the best way to do that is to build a site with information that can be found when people search on Google or other search engines.

Even if you do market to a niche for which traffic exchanges are effective, you have to remember that you have to do a lot of advertising on the traffic exchanges to get the results you want, because of the low conversion rates.

So, what do you think about downline builders and traffic exchanges?

Are they worth your time and effort?

Do you have a different, and better, approach?

I look forward to your thoughts and opinions.

Act on your dream!

JD

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