My earlier post may have caught you a bit off guard. I mean here I am a program owner, but I am telling you not to promote programs directly.

At first glance that may seem strange. Of course as a program owner I love it when people promote my sites. I enjoy sending out commission payments, and I get great joy when I get an email that is talking about me or one of my products or services.

So why would I say not to promote your referral link to my business?

It’s simple, the more successful you are the more business you can send me. Instead of promoting my business you should be promoting yourself. Build your own list and start building a relationship with that list.

Then if you like my products or services tell your list about it. You will get better results and I will end up sending you a bigger commission check.

With the same amount of traffic exchange credits that it would take you to get one sign up in a site that has been around for three years you could get two, three or maybe even more opt-ins to your list.

You could then sell things to that list several more times.

For arguments sake lets say it takes 1,000 credits. The average price for 1,000 hits is $10, so we will say it takes $10 to get one person into what ever program it is your promoting. Now if that that program is paying you $10 per sign up you just broke even.

But if you were to use those 1,000 credits and get just three opt-ins to your list. You could promote your program a little more, give more detail about it and maybe convert two of those members into paying customers. So now you have already doubled what you could have earned, and have gotten 100% increase in profits.

Now you also have these members on your list and you can recommend other products and services to them. How much more can you make?

Think about this for a second before you copy and paste your next affiliate link into your favorite TE, Safelist or any other promotion method you may use.

I want to start off with a scenario today. Lets say there is a great new program that was just launched.
It has a great product, great conversions, and a killer commission plan.

You get an email about it and decide to check it out. The sales letter sucks you in and you make a purchase.

You are excited about the commissions and think it’s a great product. You want to promote the product right away.

If you have been building a list, you simply log into your auto responder account and send a broadcast email, or maybe work it into your followup series. You tell your subscribers all about this great new product. Your work is done, now you can go back to building your list.

If you haven’t built a list you might hurry and log into all your traffic exchange accounts, change your URL to your new affiliate link, and assign however my credits you have to it.

If you don’t have a lot of credits then you start surfing as much as you can and assign more credits. You keep surfing and assigning credits to your affiliate link.

If you were one of the first people to do this you might get a few sales but, then as your surfing you start seeing other affiliate links for the same site. Before you know it there are 100 other affiliates doing the same thing you are.

The site is still getting the same amount of people joining from traffic exchanges as before but you now only have a 1 in 100 chance that it is going to be from your link.

You are not getting very many (if any) signups anymore. It seems like the program is just not converting anymore, so you look for the next big thing to promote.

Do either of the above sound familiar to you?

I was the second person in that scenario for a long long time. It took a while before I realized the people that were actually doing good online were those that were sending the emails I joined things from.

It was then that instead of spending all my credits on the next big thing, I spent them on building my list.

I stopped changing my URL’s every time a new program came out and started only to change them when I was testing a new page that built my list.

If I get excited about a new product now, I will tell my list about it, but I continue building my business first.

If you find yourself in the second category above, take a moment to think about those around you that are more successful than you. See what they are doing and see how you can apply it for yourself. And start promoting you instead of someone else.

Affiliate Funnel has done it again. They launched as the downline builder for its members, not for the owners. They have done a great job of providing all the tools you need to build your own list, and build your own business.

It may seem strange that promoting another program would actually help you build your own business and not the owners but that is truly what they have accomplished, especially with their latest feature.

When I first heard the name of this feature it I was confused, but after it was explained to me I couldn’t believe what they were doing.

The feature is called “Jump Links” and my first thought was clickbanks Hop Links, but as you will see they are nothing like them.

You see when you promote most programs you are essentially building the program owners list for them, yeah you may earn commissions or whatever they offer for you helping to promote them, but in the end you just put someone new on their list.

Well since affiliate funnel is all about you promoting your business, when ever they send out a promotional email to their list your affiliate link will automatically “jump” into the emails of your referrals.

You don‘t have to worry about building someone else’s list anymore. No matter who sends the email out to your downline it will be your affiliate link in the email.

This shows just how serious they are at Affiliate Funnel about building your business and not theirs. That in combination with all the great tools and training they provide make for a winning formula, that I have not seen anywhere else.