SFI Affiliate Scheme: Business Opportunity, Network Marketing, or Just Cheap Goods?

The AFI Affiliate Scheme has been around for almost as long as I can remember being interested in online business.

I seem to link it in my mind to a programme called Six Figure Income, something that I dismissed in the early 2000s as being plainly impossible to achieve. SFI, I reasoned, would be gone in a few short years, probably a victim of its own over-promising rhetoric.

I'm pleased to say, that, 17 years later, I was wrong. SFI seems as strong as it promised it would be. If I'd have stuck with it, who knows where I'd be today?

However, I'm back with SFI, as I see there's still room for expansion. For a start, there's a whole load of people in Europe who've never even heard of SFI...

How SFI Works

The guiding principle behind SFI, as I remember it from the past, has always been about two things:

• Transfer purchasing of everyday goods (& online services);
• Building a team.

The two are, and always have been, linked.

The idea behind Transfer Buying is that you buy everyday items from SFI's store (called TripleClicks) which are available at a discount simply because of the number of people buying them. It works really well in the US, but has yet to catch on in Europe. One reason might be because there aren't that many sellers, and paying the shipping makes them as expensive as locally bought products!

Before you write it off as a bad deal, remember two things: as there are more sign-ups, there will be more opportunity to buy locally, through TC. And, not everything that is worth buying from TC needs to be physically shipped.

eBooks, for example. Valuable eBooks about business, the internet, and internet business abound on TC, and many are keenly priced (think $2.99 to 9.99) and reviewed by an honest bunch of like-minded individuals. I won't say it's better than a certain big online retailer, but I've found it to be higher value!

So, where's the business building income opportunity? In helping to spread the word, of course, and help to bring in new suppliers (called ECAs) of goods for your local market. Think Global, act Local!

What Does SFI Sell?

The TripleClicks store sells new and used goods. SFI members can sell the contents of their garage online, and they can buy everything from Toilet Bowl Cleaner to eBooks about SEO.

There are sellers from all over the world and a powerful search system that helps match buyers with local sellers. It also lets you filter by price, too, as well as bestselling and most popular. All that you'd expect from an online store.

The heart of many online stores is, of course, the affiliate scheme. SFI is essentially TripleClicks' own team-oriented affiliate scheme. Team members are encouraged to transfer purchasing of items for the home and office into TripleClicks, and if they promote TripleClicks items themselves, they also earn a commission.

Does SFI Work?

As a business platform, SFI undoubtedly works.

Of course, you should expect to put in some effort; any affiliate knows that the only way to make commissions is to find the best products, and then promote them.

The added bonus that SFI comes with, however, is a plan, a framework, and a lot of resources that will help you to build a healthy team dynamic that centres around helping others rather than hard selling.

Your SFI business can have many different facets: building a solid team of recruiters, helping friends and family save money, becoming an info-product seller on TripleClicks, or helping local suppliers leverage the marketplace, plus any mix of the above. You get the tools, support, and leverage you need to succeed!

(Plus, don't tell anyone, but the skills you'll learn are transferable, so you've really got nothing to lose!)

Just click the banner below to find out all about SFI, and join my team!

"Don't run away from price." - Dan Kennedy

If you're not familiar with Dan Kennedy, I advise you to do a search on the internet, your favorite MP3 search engine, or a well-known video sharing site, and prepare yourself for a lot of research.

The man is a genius, and even if he admits to borrowing a lot of his wisdom from the observation of the way that markets work, and the marketing that professionals in those markets do, it take a special kind of intelligence to join up all the dots.

That's how he can charge upwards of $1,800 per day. Per day. Upwards of.

One of my favorite quotes from Dan Kennedy is "Don't run away from price." Even in a recession, you should never try to be the cheapest, because there'll always be someone cheaper. The reason why is very interesting.

Why People Get Hung Up On Price

One reason is simple enough - to appeal to as many people as possible. Your potential market may well feel bigger if you're cheaper, as more people ought to be able to afford your goods or services.

That's only true if everyone in that market is shopping on price, which isn't true. Very few people in that target market shop on price, and those people will be the ones that cause the most problems.

There's a saying - if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. You can flip that around and say - if you charge peanuts, you'll get monkeys.

Two Ways To Charge More

That's the first way to charge more. Just do it. You'll become attractive to a market that expects to pay a high price, simply because they have the money to spend. They're also the clients who are less likely to cause problems, as long as you deliver to the value of what you are charging.

That deals with the willingness to spend money. But you still have to make the product or service attractive.

Doing that requires that you are different from the other offerings on the market - usually at all levels. In other words, you need to differentiate from the cheaper products as well as the same-priced or more expensive products.

This means having a good USP (unique selling point) or EVP (extra value proposition.)

That USP needs to fulfill a need or (better) solve a problem, offer a guarantee, with a specific limit (time, cost, etc.) This was made famous by Domino's Pizza, who nailed it with their slogan offering freshly cooked pizza, delivered, inside 30 minutes, backed up with the guarantee that if they failed, you got to eat it for free.

Any mention of price? No. They don't need to, because their USP is so strong and specific that they can charge pretty much whatever they want, within reason, and will only attract the least painful customers.

So, work on these three principles - not getting hung up on price, raising prices, and developing a great USP - and you'll build a better business.

Give Your Business a Purpose with Event Based Marketing

Event based marketing usually comes in the form of a promise. That promise, in the guise of a specific business event, is designed to drive both potential customers to become paying clients, as well as to drive you, the entrepreneur to turn your idea into a product.

The purpose of the event is to give both sides a deadline.

Photo via SXC.hu

On the one hand it lets customers know when they might expect the product to be available, and on the other it gives the entrepreneur a watershed.

If they're late delivering on their promised event, they going to have to back down. It's no biggie - but usually the customers will expect (and deserve) some kind of discount, or benefit from your failure to deliver on time.

Why the freebie?

The answer is simple : event based marketing works best when the customer has already paid to be a part of your empire. They've given you money; money that you needed to get the solution built, but money that they were hoping to save by using it.

If they can't use it, they deserve compensation. After all, they've been tempted on board with the promise of availability, and if you don't meet up with their expectations, they will be very disappointed.

So, plan your event so that there's a reasonable expectation on both sides that you'll make it, but be prepared to give generously if you experience a delay.

In the long run, your customers will be happier that way.

How to Start a Business with No Skills Down (Except One!)

I've been absorbing a lot of wisdom of late. If I had to name drop, and let's face it, in this day and age it's the only way to prove your paying attention, here are a few voices that have been filling me with inspiration of late - Dane Maxwell, Sean Ogle, Tim Ferris, David Risley, Sam Ovens, Rosalind Gardner...

I could go on.

What's become apparent is that there are two approaches to building (starting) a business : stick to what you know and follow your passion/hobby, and forget what your passions are and find a market with problems to service.

Pro-bloggers, for example, tend to fall into the former camp. Dane Maxwell and The Foundation fall clearly into the latter, and then take it one step further by pointing out that the real money is in just finding people to consume services (i.e. lead generation.)

I'm sitting on the fence, and boy is it uncomfortable.

I understand that people want to follow their passion, but I also understand from watching Shark Tank, Dragon's Den, and The Apprentice, as well as listening to the wisdom of those who have gone before me, that not everyone will share that passion. It's also possible (even likely) that not enough people share your passion to make a business out of it.

So, what do you do when you find that the market wants something that falls outside your skill set?

Easy - outsource! Tim Ferris started me off thinking about this, and Dane Maxwell backed up my initial hunch that the most successful businesses are going to be those where the entrepreneur isn't doing everything themselves, and uses skills of others to help them achieve true greatness.

Plus, by outsourcing everything, you remove yourself from the business, meaning that it will happily run along without you, needing only a firm hand on the tiller from time to time.

For most of us, this is great, because we have the attention span of butterflies, and often find it tough to concentrate on the same thing for any length of time. If all we have to do is manage a bunch of outsourced processes, we're happy as can be.

The main message this - don't worry about not knowing (for example) how to write good copy, or how to create an app, or produce a membership based web site and software as a service (SaaS) offering. There are people who can do all of these things.

All you have to worry about is finding the right partners, at the right price, and then managing them. As an entrepreneur you've likely got the skills to be able to do these things, all you need to do is unlock them!

All Contact is Good Contact! Get the Marketing Message Out There!

I model railroads in my spare time. It's a fun way to relax, and I enjoy the attention to detail that it requires.


Recently, I had a small issue when building a particular model - I was missing a couple of small, but important, parts.


Now, usually, the pervading wisdom is that the contract is between the purchaser and the shop. However, you can't really ask a shop to take back a partially built model - normally they won't even take back a box that's been opened.


So, I emailed the manufacturer direct. To make a long story short, they agreed (actually, they offered) to send me the missing bits. Two, lightweight, bits of plastic was what I was expecting, and that's what I got.


Plus a catalog of new releases. And a newsletter (paper) which has introduced me to some interesting developments that I wasn't aware of. And a letter, visiting card, and associated advertising flyer.


In fact (and I've checked!) the paper weighed more than the plastic, and no doubt contributed to the postage cost which was around 1/3 of the price of the model in the first place...


On the other hand, I now want to do more business with them. Despite the fact that I was irritated when it went wrong (missing pieces) I want to do more business (buy more stuff) with them.


If I'd just received the plastic bits, I would have been happy. But, by putting some bits and pieces of information in the package, they've made me loyal. I feel loyalty to someone for making the effort to inform me.


That's a powerful lesson, but it could have been improved.


What They Did Right


They fixed the problem. They sent me a letter, and they put a good mix of valuable content and advertising in the package.


What to take away : whenever you have contact with a client, always use it as an opportunity to provide them with additional content of value, and remind them why they bought from you in the first place, and why they should do so again.


What They Did Wrong


The letter was in German, but all our communication up to then had been in English.


What to take away : make all follow-up communication relevant to the needs of the customer. They've very nearly alienated me by this oversight.


What The Could Have Done More (or Better)


There was no encouragement to buy more from them. I have reason to, thanks to the information, but I don't have the additional push that makes it worthwhile. Other retailers have included money-off offers, vouchers, and so forth.


What to take away : it's not enough to give a reason to buy from you; even prospective repeat customers need a push!


All of the above applies to online and offline businesses. Every email, every delivery, every apologetic letter after a complaint deserves to be treated as an opportunity to build trust and loyalty with your customer base.

Earnings, Cookie Cutters, and Online Programmes

I was reading through some material from Yuwanda Black and it occurred to me that people often make a fundamental mistake when evaluating business opportunities and products claiming to enable them to make a serious income - be it online or off.

Now, let's get one thing clear from the outset : it is perfectly possible to follow a sequence of steps and build (replicate) a business. This is, after all, partly how franchises work, and a good part of why brands are so powerful. 

I recently received an email from Tiffany Dow, in which se quotes visionary Simon Sinek:

"If you sell what you do, you're a vendor. If you
sell why you do it, you're a brand."

What about "If you sell how you do it, you're a franchise." Or, in internet business parlance - cookie cutter. Admittedly, that phrase has some negative connotations, but it works for some people, some of the time. The trick is picking the right one - i.e. getting the balance of cost, income and available time right.

Part of why a lot of people don't have success with these programmes is that:

• their expectations (income, effort, etc.) are unrealistic;
• the resources required (time, money, etc.) become greater than the reward.

Which brings us to the point of this post - people often make a single, important, fundamental mistake when calculating the time/reward ratio. Some sales letters encourage this, by starting out with a perfectly reasonable figure, say 1,000 (dollars, Pounds, Yen, etc.) per month, and then working back to claim that this is possible with only a few hours work per day, which means you'll be earning over $80 per hour!

Who wouldn't want that? After all, $80 per hour, 5 days per week (7 hours per day), is over $130,000 per year. Wow!

In planning a start-up, people often make the same mistake - they forget that, even if they do charge $80-100 per hour, they will never, ever, be able to work 5 days per week, 7 hours per day, all year round. Work, in this case, means performing the tasks that directly earn income.

For a start, as an online entrepreneur, you will spend upwards of 30% of your time marketing, whether that be creating newsletters, contacting prospects, setting up advertising programmes, or just following up emails.

So, to work for 7 hours, you'll probably spend 2 more marketing. That's already a 9 hour day, which, as many entrepreneurs will tell you, is a luxury. Mostly it's 12 hours plus.

On the other hand, when working out expected income from any plan, it pays to factor in the marketing time required, and certainly when establishing a price for services, that cost (along with any travel, research time, etc.) also needs to become a component of what you charge.

The conclusion? Don't forget that working and working are two different things. Only one earns money, and the other needs to become part of the charging cycle, or at least you have to remember that if a piece of work takes two hours, and earns $100, there has been a cost involved in getting that work, and so you've not really made $50 per hour.

Until the next time : earn and learn!