I am new at this so I can't say whether it will work but I have high hopes.
According to most affiliates:
1. ADVERTISING is the key. In order to make money you have to advertise at least one hour every day. Personally I have spent a full week advertising like crazy and had not a single response. But I might have been doing it wrong. So I bought, with my Member Reward Points, so not investing any cash, a list of 2000 free advertising websites and 250 Google communities. When I tried out the list, out of the first 250 only 12 were actually functional free advertising sites, and most of them were specific for India. However I have to take the time to go through the rest of the list. A list of real, functional free ad websites is worth quite a lot, don't you think? Now to find the time to sit down and really advertise - for that is what I must do and am not doing. Update June 3rd: I have now gone through 500 of the list and actually advertised on 6 sites. What can you advertise for? For new affiliates and people who want to sell online. But also TripleClicks products. Literally anything. Books, gardening items, jewelry, fitness things, handbags, watches, kitchen utensils. Example:
tripleclicks.com2. BUYING TRAFFIC. This works for me. I have invested $12 in a couple of thousand visitors, and the first 500 have already arrived the week I published this. My SFI blog now has more than 3000 pageviews, up from 100+. Better yet, I am receiving signups out of these: affiliates and PRMs. So this works. I am certainly going to do this again. Update April 17th, 2017: definitely the best go. Works fantastically for me. I have just this month added around 50 PSAs and 25 PRMs to my list.
3. BLOGGING. This blog and 2 others I have (topcat2015.blogspot.se and topcat66blog@wordpress.com) attract visitors and now and then a signup. The important thing is to have regular new good content, which is not always easy. I feel I have to tell the truth about how things are going for me and then it will attract people. It seems to work. This blog generates the most signups so far. I also have a website topcat.sfiprofitsnetwork.com which attracts some visitors by itself and I sometimes buy traffic for it.
4. PERSONAL RECRUITING. I have gone to the local government job market and grabbed everyone who came out, started a talk with them about online marketing and working from home. I have gotten a couple of PSAs (Personally Sponsored Affiliates, the people that fall under you in your team) that way. Unfortunately none of them has remained active because this is not a Get Rich Quick Scheme, which is what they were looking for; or maybe they just wanted a regular job.
5. FACEBOOK and other social media. According to most affiliates this works best. Not for me, but then, I am not at all adept at social media. I never post on FB except with SFI promotion. Same for Twitter. On LinkedIn I have put links to my blogs on my profile. I have no others. I have gotten some visitors to my blogs out of it, though.
6. APPROACHING PROSPECT ECAs. Personally stepping into a business and convincing people that they can sell online is something I sincerely believe must work. However I have not been lucky at it. I have approached the Chamber of Commerce in my home country and the Association for Small Businesses where I used to be secretary. They thought it was a marvelous idea for their members, but I have not had a single signup after that. I am pretty sure that the key problem here is follow-up; although I have emailed them once afterwards, research shows that people have to be exposed to a good offer 7 times on the average before they make the decision. Here is where autoresponders come in. I haven't quite figured it out yet, how to make that work, but they basically send the e-mails for you automatically. You do have to write them, of course, but only once.
I also visited about 35 businesses and had a few who were interested, but again, no signups. I did not follow up here either. It is on my To-Do list.
7. DUPLICATION. Apart from personally recruiting affiliates you can also buy them or earn them or win them in auctions-last week I won 25 PSAs for just $0.36 and 4 bids. My sponsor put me under her S-Coop Builder (an advertising scheme) and I generally receive a couple of PSAs a month from that. I also lose a couple of PSAs/CSAs every month due to inactivity (no great loss there, they are only clogging up my list). My team is growing steadily; I now have 96 PSAs and 140 CSAs. Currently, 1 PSA is active and 8 CSAs. Last month I received commission on my CSAs for the first time. So that is also working, albeit slowly.
