Ladies and gentlemen we’re going to talk about the Affiliate Dilemma. This is a pretty cool one that I’ve never talked about before. I’ve probably mentioned some of these things here and there just in conversation in other webinars. People have asked a couple of questions sporadically throughout the Thursday night calls but we’ve never really addressed it hit on and I’m going to do that tonight. 
Thanks to one of our charter members who has been a member since pretty much from the beginning. He’s on every Thursday night call. As you know, he moderates our groups for us, he’s constantly helping people inside the MUA group. He approached me today and he said, “I have these questions and I just need answers,” and he just threw them into my chat box on Facebook.
The reality is this, not all affiliates are good affiliates to have. Melinda and I learned this the hard way to the tune of $23,000. My $23,000 mistake is going to be your advantage here. It’s going to be your success. You’re going to learn from our $23,000 mistake. 
Let me tell you something, that $23,000 hit us hard at the time when we didn’t have money, when we we’re just starting. It was about a year into it. I’m going to talk to you about how we lost that money and I’m going to explain to you the difference of good and bad affiliate. We’re going to kick it off by basically covering the mindset that you need to have in order to be successful with internet marketing, especially when it comes to recruiting affiliates to promote your business. 
When deciding whether or not you’re going to do business with someone, you should think like an employer. When we start building our business, sadly, most of us do not have an abundance of money or else we wouldn’t be trying to build a business. But it is truly a conundrum, by every definition of the word, because the reality is that when you are broke, when you are having financial problems, when you’re having trouble managing money, when you’re getting harassed by creditors, when your credit scores sucks, when you’re having all kinds of money problems, is not the best time in your life to invest in a business because obviously, your life has gotten out of control. 
Unfortunately, that tends to be about the time that most people turn to the internet to start making money. They come to the internet with this whole “Oh my God, I gotta make money right away, and there is a sales page that said I could be rich tomorrow.” 
The majority of people think that way and that is why the majority of people that tried to start a business online failed. They’re not really trying to start a business, what they’re really trying to do is make quick money. And as we know, there’s no such thing. 
However, those that do start to kind of, sort of start a business, they are in the wrong mindset because they want to make money real fast and they think that the more affiliates, the merrier, the more the people that promote for me the better. If just one guru would send an email to his list for my product, that’s all I would need, I’d be rich! 

Wrong, you wouldn’t. Gurus mail for me all the time. The reality is that there isn’t any one person out there that can solve your financial problems except you. That was the mentality that I didn’t really fully have my arms around when I started in the beginning.
For me, I wanted anybody and everybody. If you even kind of had a pulse, I wanted you promoting my product. I didn’t care if you have a list, I don’t care. Are you willing to promote my product? Okay, no problem. What do you need? Do you need swipes? Do you need links? Do you need banners? What do you need? I’ll give it to you. 
I’d get in bed with anybody, so to speak, I didn’t mean that literally. But I mean, I didn’t care who you were, what you did, what niche you were in. I’m launching a product, I’ll need you on board. Bad, bad mentality, bad decision. 
If you are hiring a sales team to represent your company, what types of questions would you ask? Again, as an employer, what responses would you expect? Once you hired somebody, how would you treat them?
It’s a funny thing because I was working full-time as a sales manager, I was actually managing the largest company of its kind in the United States. And, I was doing that very, very well and somebody paid me to do that. I was even a national trainer. They would send me to events to teach people, I was doing videos, and movies, and DVDs. They had me teaching their whole company. 
[I had] One part of my job was hiring people and running ads on Career Builder, Monster - recruiting, doing interviews and all these things. I actually had to then create a training course for when I had my new hires. I had a day when they had to fill out their paperwork, I had instructions, I had a folder for them. When I hire people, I hire four at a time. I spend the day doing all their training videos and I'd give them all their brochures and booklets and all their stuff. 
I would do all of this for someone else, for someone else’s business. But then when it came to my own, “Yeah, come on you got a list! Promote! Promote!” I mean, heck! When you wanted to work for me when I was a manager for someone else, I would be so strange, I would be so selective. I would do a background check, I do a drug test, I would sit you down for two interviews, I would have a resume, I would go through this whole veining procedure if I was gonna train you to sell for my company, to represent my company to the public. If I was gonna have you tell people that they should buy my product, I had this entire hiring procedure.
But, all that shit went out the window when I became an internet marketer. Why? Why? I ask you, why? The answer is because when we approached this, typically, in the beginning, the majority of us do not approach it with the right mindset, we don’t approach it with the business mindset, we don’t approach our tasks with the schedule. We understand that we’re trying to build a business but then again, we don’t divide our business into sections and departments. 
Even if you’re a business of one person, you still have departments, you still have customer service tasks that have to happen every day, you still have market research tasks that have to happen everyday, you still have product development tasks that have to happen everyday. You literally are the manager and the employee of every one of those departments. The right thing to do is to schedule your day so that you’re investing time to each of those departments. 
We don’t do that, much especially when we’re new. When we’re new, 90% of your day is on Twitter or Facebook, the other 10% is on YouTube trying to learn how to do something for free because you’re too cheap to buy the $9 double-your-sell that’s gonna teach you. That’s what your first few months are spent doing. And then eventually somewhere down the line, 3% of people realize, “Shit, I gotta get serious about this and I’ve got to start treating this like a business.” 
Unfortunately, those of that stick with that, stay with that, anybody who’ll promote - two things happen. One of two things happen; Number one, either they go to the dark side and they end up getting pulled into the whole scamming route, the whole spanning route, the whole one-click-riches route because that’s what happens when you go down there, when you don’t really care who you associate with, who you promote for, who promotes for you. You don’t mind if you’re branded as that guy that’s spamming or that guy that’s working with the other dude in the porn niche or that other guy who’s buying and selling him email addresses. That’s just one of the directions that you go to is the dark side. 
The other directions that you go to are basically back to the job, to the jail, because things just don’t work out for you online. Unless you grasp this whole mentality that I’m talking about here which is that of a business, that of treating it like an employer. Then, one of those two fates is what awaits you.
For the rest of us, what kind of questions would you ask? What kind of questions would you ask if you were interviewing somebody? I would ask things about their experience, about where did you learn to do what you do, who taught you? What types of things do you do today? What do you do on your time off? Whatever you did, can you show me some of the stuff that you’ve already done? Do you have any references that I can call, people that you’ve done this for in the past? 
What would I expect? How would I expect that person communicate with me? If I was running interviews, how would I expect people to talk to me when they show up when they call me on the phone to apply, when they email me their resume when they show up, how do I expect them to be dressed? All of these things. Obviously, I’m getting hypercritical here, but you get the point, you expect the best of the best when you’re going to pay people. 
Well, aren’t you paying people a commission? Aren’t you sharing in the profits? Isn’t it your name that’s all over the sales page that these people are promoting? Don’t you want to know whether or not they’re going to use ethical tactics to put people in front of your page? I sure do. These are important things to know. 
When it comes to deciding who should I do business with as an affiliate, the sooner you get through your head that there are good affiliates and there are bad affiliates to have, the better and the stronger you’ll be building your business. Because the reality is that it’s not about the quantity, it is about quality.
Let’s talk about some of these questions that my good friend asked me with regards to the affiliate dilemma. 
His first one is are there any JVs that I do now approve? Yes, but there’s a few part to this question that is important for me to talk about. That is, it depends on the platform. At the current time that I did this presentation, we are in the process of switching all of our product over to JVZoo. I’ve tried many affiliate platforms for a very, very long time. I was a big Clickbank guy. Before that, I was big pay.com guy. I tried Deal Guardian a little bit, I tried My Own Affiliate Platform. Then, we worked with Nanacast for a long time, very powerful system with a lot of features but complicated and tough to work with. 
There’s a lot of different affiliate platforms out there. They all work a little bit differently, they generally do the same thing. They provide a place for a vendor and an affiliate to connect, to generate unique links that will attract sales. That’s generally what happens. Some of them have a market place and some of them don’t. Some of them do instant commission, some of them don’t. Some of them require prior review and approval of your product before it’s listed, some of them don’t.
Whether or not there are JVs that I’ll approve and that I won’t approve, it kind of depends. For example, in Clickbank, generally no. Clickbank does have a white listing feature but generally, anybody that has a Clickbank ID can get a Clickbank vendors’ link and they can just promote it. There’s no application process. 
But in that particular case, it’s not that big of a deal because Clickbank itself is the vendor. In the situation that you’re selling with some platforms, you’re actually listing your product for them to sell. The affiliate is promoting for Clickbank as the vendor. You’re signing an agreement when you list something in Clickbank saying, “Clickbank is the vendor of this product.” I’m not the vendor of this product. Clickbank is using their PayPal account, not yours, which means that if shady stuff happens, it does not matter to your Paypal account. You’re not gonna lose your account. But along with that comes the responsibility that Clickbank is accountable. Therefore, they put you through product approval process. It’s a little bit differently. 
To answer the first question, are there any JVs that I do not approve? Absolutely, there are. There are tons of people that I do not approve. I don’t approve all kinds of affiliate, and I can probably make a list of things. But I think since this question is going to be more geared towards the JVZoo platform which actually gives you the ability to set your product so that it can auto-approve or show that people have to manually request approval. I recommend when using JVZoo that you always set your products so that people must be manually approved. You should not automatically approve anybody that you don’t know personally and that you don’t really approve of. Just because somebody is applied to promote for you, does not mean that they are a good affiliate. 

Somebody you might recognize, maybe you don’t know them and they’ve never been an affiliate before but let’s say somebody named Mike Filsaime applied. The next thing I will look at is how many sales does he have because you can look that person’s sales that he had. “Wow, so okay Mike Filsaime has 5000 plus sales.” This must be the right Mike Filsaime. He’s got a history of 5000 plus sales in JVZoo, his name is Mike Filsaime and he requested to promote my product. Guess what? That guy is going to be on instant payment - auto approved forever for every product which you can do. 
But then you got another guy. What if it was Mike Filsaime kind of weird spelling other words feel same and zero sales for that guy in JVZoo. “Nope! Denied. Not approved. Sorry.” 
I don’t care about political correctness, I don’t care about geopolitical correctness. I pretty much will not approve anyone from Nigeria, anyone that looks suspicious with some really, really weird looking name that I can’t even pronounce and they have zero sales, zero histories. I’ve never heard of them or seen them. That’s just trouble. That’s just looking for trouble. I instantly deny those people. Once they get more sales under their belt, and once they have a history, I’m not going to be a guinea pig. 
You might say, “That’s not fair.” Screw you! Then you approve them for your product. You’ll be the guinea pig, let them screw up your PayPal account and your livelihood. I’m not going to do it. Call me whatever you want to call me, I’m not going to because it’s a business that I’m running. There are certain people that I wouldn’t let work for me. 
If you come to my interview and you have a face full of piercings, a bone through your nose and tattoos on your face, you’re not getting the job. So you might think, “Oh, that is so racist of you!” Okay, I’ll be the racist that still has a PayPal account. 
It comes down to business. And yes, there are some people that you should not approve to promote your product. Anybody that has a history of zero sales gets denied. As a matter of fact, anybody that’s under 25 sales gets put on delayed payments. Meaning, they don’t get instant payment from me. The reason for that is, what I’m about to tell you now. 
A number of sales, the sales history or whether or not I know the person’s big. And you might say, “Why is sales history important? What is this instant payout?” You kinda have to understand a little bit about the way the JVZoo works, the way that the affiliate platform works. Clickbank is a little different, but because Clickbank there’s a time frame, and again, with Clickbank, the time frame and the approval really doesn’t matter because it’s not your PayPal account that’s in jeopardy; I can’t stress that enough. 
But here’s what I’m saying. With JVZoo, when someone applies to promote your product you get a request, you get an email and it says hey, somebody’s applied to promote your product. And then when you click that link in email, it takes you to your JVZoo account and says okay. This is person the person that’s applied, you can send them a message here, this is their amount of sales that they’ve had, they’ve been a member since whenever and you can either set them off auto-approval of your products, you can set them up for instant payment, you can set them up for delayed payments or you can deny them. Those are the four buttons. 
If somebody has zero sales, deny. I will not be the guinea pig. I will not be the guinea pig part. Why? Number one, you don’t want people that don’t know how to promote promoting your product. You might say, “Why can’t you teach him to promote?” Yeah, you can. But again, I am not willing to risk my business. If you want to do that, do that; I know nothing about this person. 
If this person goes out of their way to build a relationship with me, to get to know me, if that person builds trust and I see them around for awhile then it might be different. But we’re talking about strangers; people we don’t know that have zero experience. Would you hire someone with zero sale experience to sell for your company, to literally just put them out the door and sell them? No, you wouldn’t because it’s a stupid business move to do that. Put political correctness on the shelf and just let’s talk common sense. If somebody has zero sales you should be denying them.
The other thing is that when you approve some of these weird people from weird countries, you gotta understand something. There’s a lot of people out there that are gaining the system. They are trying to get over. They don’t have lists. What they have are stolen credit card numbers. Yes, there are all kinds of scams, phishing scams, email scams or people get their credit card detail. I got one the other day on Skype, somebody sent me a Skype message and said: “Hey, can you check out this site.” It was a clone of the Skype login page. It was asking me to enter my username, why would I enter my Skype username I’m already logged in. You know what I mean. 
It was a scammer. That site has been hacked. Had I gone to that, it wasn’t that Skype site; it was a very similar looking URL and it was a clone of their site because there are assholes all the time that are launching products and software that clone other people’s sites and then affiliates that are even bigger assholes that promote them. Do you realize what you’re doing? You’re literally saturating our internet marketing community with software that’s hurting us.
But anyway, there’s all kind of phishing scams out there that get people to enter their credit card details and enter their PayPal detail. There are literally scammers out there, they based themselves in Nigeria and other third world countries that Interpol can’t even reach. What happens is they go and they sign up. 
Remember, it’s really tough to just get money out of a credit card company. You live in Nigeria, what you’re going to do? Are you gonna start hoarding a bunch of stuff from Amazon with somebody else’s credit card? It’s not gonna work. You want money, you want cash, you want it quick. 
What these people do is they go sign up as affiliates for products then they get their own affiliate link to that product, then they go and they buy the product with their stolen credit cards through their own affiliate link. You see what’s happening there? The moment they do that, they get in silly PayPal 50% or whatever the percentage of that product is into their PayPal account. These people are always creating brand new accounts in these affiliate programs and they’re applying to every vendor out there. These things are out there. These things exist and they’re much more common than you might think.
You know what, I’m running a business. You risk it with your business. I’m not gonna risk it with my business. If you have zero sales, guess what? You’re not getting improved. Remember that story that I told you I was gonna tell you about us losing $23,000? Well, that’s exactly how it happened. 
When we launch KickAss Sales Pages, it was one of our first products that we launch. We’re ready now to relaunch the 2015 version, but back when we launch the first one many years ago, it was the third product that we launched and we made $30,000 in sales; it was our first one that we made with some decent money with. It wasn’t a six-figure launch, it wasn’t a quit-your-job kind of money but you know, I had to work for six months to assemble that launch. 
We made that money and the sales were coming in but they were fraudulent sales from affiliates that I had approved that I should never have approved. I should never, never ever have approved those people. What ended up happening was I got $23,000 worth of charge backs thirty days later after we’ve already pulled out a lot of that money and spent that money. 
The PayPal account was suspended, all kinds of problems happened. Because this was a group of affiliates from Russia using rotating IP Addresses from Russia; I had to do several calls with PayPal to let them know this all happened. They helped me work through it, I was cleared of all. I got my PayPal account back and everything. But this was six years ago from the time that I’m recording this.
Again, these things are out there. These things are problems. Here’s the deal, anybody that I don’t know and that has less than 25 sales, I put them on delayed payments. The reason I put them on delayed payments is that now, they don’t get their money instantly. I have to manually pay them out. I’ll get an alert from JVZoo. I’ll see like a little red stripe on the top of the of my JVZoo saying, “Hey, you’ve got a commission that is due, people need to be paid.” I’ll release those funds once the refund period has expired on the product and I know I haven’t had a whole bunch of chargeback, a whole bunch of refunds because people didn’t get scammed. It was actual buyers that bought the product and not people getting fraudulently scammed because their credit card details have been stolen. 
If I don’t know who you are, I put you on 30-delay payment in case something like that does happen, I don’t get caught holding the bag and I didn’t pay that money.
These are some of the things that I look at. This is another very good question here, “Is there a blacklist that vendors can pile and pass around of people to not approve as an affiliate?” As a matter of fact, there is, there is a black list that you can put people on the inside of JVZoo, there is a serial refund or black list. You can actually block people, you can ban affiliates from promoting. 
As far as a list, an underground list that we pass around secretly in Skype groups, in chat groups to one another and hand each other, no. There are some clicks like I do belong to one Facebook group that has scammer lists of people not to do business with. I think there is a hundred something name on that lists. 
But you know, they’re impractical. Those lists are impractical. Here’s the reason why those lists are impractical. Whenever you meet somebody new that you’re going to do business with, you don’t go and try to fetch those list and see if their names are on it. It's just not something you do, it’s not part of you natural process. Those things really don’t serve a purpose. But JVZoo does have a feature where you can blacklist serial refunders. I’ve actually set in mind that you can’t buy from me if you’ve refunded more than three products in the last 30 days, you’re a serial refunder. Some people do it in two products, some people in one product in 30 days. I think that’s silly, I’ve refunded a product before. You shouldn’t penalize somebody because they’ve refunded products.
But if you bought three internet marketing products this month and you refunded all three, I don’t want you buying from me! Because what going to happen is you’re going to ask for a refund. They get blocked. It’s funny to see these people send emails. 
There’s no underground blacklist that I partake in, but I will tell you this. It is a small community, we all talk in masterminds, super affiliates belong to groups, and we do talk. If someone is being a jerk, if someone is doing the wrong thing, recently, there was this launch that was not being handled properly in the back end. There were all kinds of issues, word got around, everybody stopped promoting it. Within two days, that product was off the market. It just died a horrible death because it just got around because that vendor was not doing the right thing.
Next one here, is it legal to compile and pass around a blacklist even if people are crooks? That’s tricky. What if someone makes a mistake? Or what if somebody has an agenda? What if somebody puts my name on it just because they don’t like me. Maybe they came to me and say, “Hey Omar, can you give me your product for free? I want your $2,000 product for free, and if you don’t give it to me I’m going to put you on the blacklist.” Put me on the freaking blacklist, I don’t give a crap, you’re not going to get my product for free. 
Technically, if somebody’s name is on there and they’re unhappy about that and it’s hurting their business, that is called slander, I believe. There is two of them, slander and another thing. I'm not a lawyer so I don’t know exactly which one would fall under and what jurisdiction and whatever. Libel and slander. 
You’ve got to be careful about that. You’ve got to be careful. I’m very outspoken, you guys know this on social media and everything. I call people out that are doing the wrong thing. But have you noticed that it’s always a personal experience?
When I call somebody a moron on Facebook, I say “Hey, this is why I think this person’s a moron, let me show you my experience with this guy, and I take a picture of what he said to me.” I’m simply testifying, it’s my testimonial as to a personal experience that I had with this person. 


For example, people say you should never say something bad about someone online because that’s libel and that’s slander. Wrong! Wrong! Giving a bad testimonial is not against the law. Go to eBay, how many bad feedbacks do you get? Go to any of these sites where you can rate the transaction. 
If it was illegal to say bad things about companies and vendors, then all these feedbacks are violations. I can mark something as zero starts and say, “I was scammed, this was terrible, I didn’t get it blah blah.” 
Now, when you turn that around, you go on social media and you’ve run an advertising campaign saying, “This guy is a crook, he’s a criminal. He’s a scammer.” Now, you’re deliberately going out of your way to harm somebody’s business. I’m not a lawyer, but I’m just saying that those things exist. You gotta be careful with how you do it. I have no problem talking about something that happened to me or that I witnessed. As a matter of fact, I encourage people to come out and speak up when something wrong has been done to them by a vendor.
Is there a list of serial refunders or charge backers that you don’t want to sell to? Yes, that is, in fact, called a black list and that is in JVZoo. You can blacklist people, they have a global suppression list that people are on. I think JVZoo themselves, I don’t remember what their amount is, but if you have a certain amount of refunds or a certain amount of time they put you on this blacklist. You can choose to not sell the people on the block list. As a vendor, you can exclude people from the black list. Again, yes, that does exist. You really should protect yourself against from serial refunders and charge backers.
Chargebacks are a pretty serious thing. To be honest, I don’t care about the $97 or the $197, or $297. What happens is people are stupid. They are embarrassed. They don’t want to confront you when they want their money back because they’re spineless little gelatinous blobs and what they want to do is avoid you to get their money back because they were really just dipping their toe in the water, they never had any intention doing anything with your product. They just love the way that they feel when they buy a lot of stuff. They need to have something to blame when they’re lazy. 
Here’s the thing, they buy the product and you give them 30-day money back guarantees or 60-day or whatever your policy is. What I’m going to do is I just go to PayPal and I’m going to put through a dispute and I’m going to say “I never wanted this product,” or better say “I never got the product.” PayPal will give me my money back. If PayPal doesn’t give my money back, I’m going to my credit card company and I’m going to issue a chargeback. That’s what I’m going to do. And you know what? I would gladly give you the money to avoid the charge backs. 
As a vendor when you’re doing a high volume, charge backs put points on your account. Certain accumulation of points increased the interest rate that you have to pay on your charges. Too many points you get suspended like the license system. Having a merchant account is a privilege. I would gladly give you though, here is the $197, a handshake and a smile from me. 
Like I said, these serial refunders, they’re stupid. They don’t know. They don’t care. They’ll never ever run a business. They’ll never succeed in life or anything because this is the mentality they have. They have a scarcity mentality, they feel that there’s a finite amount of money in the world “I have to use this little bit money and I have to use this money and get it back” like a little squirrel. Yes, there is a black list of serial refunders. You know what, these are all things that JVZoo does very well, very well. It doesn’t exist in Clickbank. 
In Clickbank, your metrics are so screwed. By the second day, you're launching a product and you’ve got such a low earnings per click or earning per hop as they call it. You’ve got so many hops coming to your order from garbage traffic, people that’ll send 3,000, 4,000, 10,000 clicks and zero sales. It’s just garbage traffic that skews up your stats and makes sure earnings per click look low because you trusted some affiliate that you didn’t know and he’s driving a stupid redirect traffic, a robot traffic, or just safelist traffic, stuff that doesn’t convert. 
Maybe he has a list that he stole of two million names from who-knows-where and he uploads it to new IP Address every time he mails and spams the crap out of that list. Now your site is getting a whole bunch of spam complaints, your site is added to the spamhaus and you get black listed and when people try to go to your site and see a big red page from Google that says “Warning: Attack site reported.” All because you approved some affiliate that you’ve never heard of before. And because that idiot doesn’t know how to do any real internet marketing and he thinks it’s all about scamming and getting and spamming people and just putting the link in front of as many people as possible. But that doesn’t work, it’s not the way that you sell.
Last couple of questions here, when you pay the delayed affiliates? 15, 30, 60 days or after the refund period is up. That’s an easy one after the refund period is up. I usually wait a little bit even after. Maybe a week or two afterward. 
If somebody asked me for a refund on date 31, I’ll give it to him. 35, 36, I’m going to have some questions for him. 60 days after 30 days, I’m not going to get him a refund. But at the end of the day to avoid a charge back, I’ll give a refund. The thing with delayed payments is you don’t know the person. You don’t know if they’re fraudulently going to try to scam you and get that commission for you. The worst thing that you could do is pay somebody their commission and then you get charged back. 
For example, if I sold the $100 product and I offer a $50 commission on it, I got a $100. If I instantly paid you out, now you got your $50 and I got my $50. 30 days later, the person that bought it realizes, “Oh my God, I didn’t want this. My credit card was stolen.” They reported their card stolen and now the bank charges back the full $100. I only had $50 of that $100, I already paid out the affiliate the other 50 and he’s gone. That’s why you want to delay your payments for people that you don’t know. 
Contest prizes. When do you award them? After the refund period? No, don’t be that guy. If you don’t have the prize, if you don’t have the money for the prize right now, don’t offer the prize. If you offer a prize, be ready to pay that price immediately after your contest is over. There are scammers out there that do that crap. That’s stupid. 
“I’m offering a $10,000 dollar prize.”  What if that guy drove garbage traffic? You shouldn’t have let me promote for you if you thought I was driving garbage traffic. That’s why. That’s number one. 
Number two, regardless of the traffic, was there stipulation that the sales had to stay for a certain amount of time? Because it was a sales contest, it was the highest number of sales contest, not the least number of refunds contest. Those are two completely different contests. “I won the highest number of sales contest, and the sales finished last night, now pay me!” 
Basically, you don’t have the money, you offer the prize, and you offer the prize. You offer the promise. There’s a word for that, it’s called fraud. 
How many realistically can you promise a reciprocal promotion of the product? Realistically, it just depends on how busy your schedule is and how often you want a mail. Generally speaking, I can promise reciprocal mailings to my top ten because I’m usually willing to mail for those people anyway, but I always have rules. I have rules for mailing. Just because you’ve got a product that you’re releasing in three days, does not mean that I owe you. 
You mail me, that’s great. You want me to mail for you? I have rules. Do you want to work with me? I have rules. I need to have your product, 60 days in advance, I need to see a sample of the product, I need to see a sample of every one of the pages. “Who got their pages done in sixty days? Who’s got a sample?” You know who? The guy that wants me to promote for him, that’s who. Don't you get that? Guess what? I don’t promote. 
How many people can you promise reciprocal mailing? You know what? You might want to use that as a leveraging tool, maybe even as a prize, maybe the top two on your leaderboard get a reciprocal email campaign from you with a bonus, maybe the bottom five get just one email, but the top two will get a bonus from you as well. You’ll promote their product with a bonus. 
Be creative. Remember, run your business from a position of power, not a position of fear. In the beginning, when you’re running your business without any money in the bank, you tend to take a lot of shortcuts, you tend to be willing to do a lot of things you otherwise wouldn’t. When we are running our business without the money in the bank to back it up, we don’t spend as much time thinking things through because we need money quick, so we try to make quick decisions that are going to lead us to money. And unfortunately, those decisions are being made from a position of fear. Fear of the fact that you don’t have money and you’re going to lose money. You really need to be selective of who you work with from day one.
The things that I’ve talked about here today can help but at the end of the day, it just comes down to you being vigilant, to you being aware that’s it’s a business you’re running, and that you need to pick and choose who you do business with. If you’re hiring salespeople for your company, what would you? What would you ask? What would you expect? 

I want to thank our member for asking these questions today because I thought they were all awesome, well thought out questions and things I’ve never covered before. I even decided to make a presentation about it.
If you’ve got a series of questions like this on a particular topic that you’d like to submit, feel free to go ahead and hit me up either on Facebook group or feel free to use the suggestion box to give us the suggestion for a topic.