One of biggest mistakes I see affiliates making everyday is that their building a short-term business where they just make a small sale – one sale at a time. If they stop running ads today, their business would shut down! The strategy we’re going to discuss now will allow any affiliate to build a long-term business. This strategy will allow you to upsell your visitors for expensive services. Even more importantly, by using this strategy you’ll soon become recognized as an expert in your field and making money will be all easier!

So what is this strategy? … … You guessed it, it’s building an opt-in list – a newsletter/Ezine.

By having an opt-in list you’re building a customer base instead of just small sales! You can sell same customer over and over without having any more advertising costs. You build a trust with your readers that allows them to be loyal in doing business through you affiliate link!

So, as an affiliate, how do you build an opt-in list?

=============== How to Build List ===============

The simplest way I have found is to start deferring all of my traffic that I pay for to an opt-in page. After person opts-in, have them land on a thank you page where you pre-sell them for affiliate product.

So, you’re probably already building traffic to your site – now, instead of sending that traffic directly to your affiliate link, send it to a page that has an opt-in.

========================== How Should My Opt-In Page Look? ==========================

The next most popular question is how to make opt-in page look. Believe it or not, there actually IS a strategy behind this. Your page MUST be small, short and to point. This means that you should NOT have a long sales letter type page to get them to opt-in.

Just about every course or book that deals with getting referrals teaches you one single referral method - - "asking" for referrals.

Yes, they'll teach you how you have to give good service and then they give you a formula for asking for referrals and that's all well and good....BUT...

...there's a HUGE problem with this approach. People HATE to ask for referrals. You hate it, I hate it, and people that get asked hate it.

And bottom line is...people won't do what they hate to do. That's just simple human nature.

Asking people for referrals is right up there with asking your friend to come to church with you on Sunday. It's downright uncomfortable.

The sad result is that people don't get even a tiny amount of referrals they could be getting simply because whole "asking" process is flawed.

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Here's Other Problem with Asking for Referrals... _____________________________________________

Let's just suppose for a moment that you do ask for referrals. Do you ask all your clients and customers? Do you ask them every time you see them?

Probably not.

Why?

Because it's not a systematic process for you. There's not a bell that goes "ding!" to remind you to ask for a referral every time you're with a customer.

But if you REALLY want a LOT of referrals. I mean an avalanche of referrals, you need to have a systematic process for getting them.

Referral S - Y - S - T - E - M - S

Systems are business processes that have predictable results and outcomes because they happen same way ever time, day in and day out.

I like to think of systems using this acronym:

S-ystems save

Y-ou

S-tress

T-ime

E-nergy and

M-oney

If you want to get more referrals you need to implement referral s-y-s-t-e-m-s.

And referral system needs to be "transactional" and NOT "relationship-based."

NOTE: I'm about to ruffle a LOT of feathers with this one. It goes against everything you've been taught about getting referrals.

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"Transaction-Based" Referrals - The Key to Getting a Consistent, Predictable Flow of Fresh Referrals _______________________________________________________