AP 0907: How Do I Handle Negativity Towards Affiliate Marketing?

AskPat 907 Episode Transcript

Editor's note: The SPI Facebook group is no longer active. We encourage you to check out SPI Pro, our private, growing community of business owners.

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 907 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

We have an amazing question today coming in from Jackie, but before we get to that, I want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks, an awesome company serving millions of small businesses, including my own, with helping us manage our business finances, from easily managing our income and our expenses—you can now actually automatically track your expenses through the system and connect it to your credit card account. But, what's really cool is the invoicing features. If you do any invoicing of any kind, maybe you are a coach or you do consultations or you're a freelancer, billing people and getting paid is really important, and this is a great way to go about it because you can create an invoice to somebody you're charging in less than thirty seconds, you can keep track of not only who owes but also who has even yet to open those invoices, which is key because then you can follow up with them, you can get paid sooner, and it's just so easy to use. If you want to check it out for free, all you have to do is go to FreshBooks.com/askpat, and you'll get a thirty-day free trial. Check it out, FreshBooks.com/askpat. Just make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section. Thanks.

All right, now here's today's questions from Jackie.

Jackie: Hey, Pat. This is Jackie Bolen from ESLSpeaking.org. Today, my question is related to how I talk about what I do with friends and family. I have some Amazon affiliate websites where I do reviews of products, and of course, as you and your audience know, it's not a sketchy way to make money, I'm giving people real information about whether to buy product A or product B or product C. But when I tell my friends and family that I do affiliate marketing, and that I make commission when people click my links and buy things from Amazon, I get some negative reactions from people so I'm just wondering how to explain it, or should I not worry about it or how would you deal with that? I'm sure you've been through this before yourself. Thank you for all you do, Pat. Take care.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Jackie. Thank you so much for the question. I appreciate your honesty here and I appreciate you sharing that. You're getting some small wins, or maybe they're big wins, with the affiliate marketing tactics that you're using. But I'm sorry to hear that you're having people, especially friends and family—I know it can be hard to hear negative reactions from them especially because you care for them and you love them, and to see them cringe a little bit or however they're reacting or say certain things, it doesn't feel very good. The number one thing I would say is, yes, with your friends and family sometimes, you can't just walk away from them or never see them again, which is what I would recommend for a troll who you don't know online—don't even pay attention to them. You obviously want to be respectful toward your family and such, but if this is something that you know for certain isn't going to rub them the right way and you know it's not you . . . I mean, you should know it's not you and it feels like, based on the way that you ask this question, you know that's not the case. You know it's negativity that's coming into reflection on something that they're going through. It could simply be jealousy or an instance of that or it could be a sense of, “Well, I'm just not feeling like . . . How could Jackie be doing this and I can't? Let me just put her down a little but to make myself feel better.” Those kinds of things often are the root of a lot of that negativity, but it is placed on you, especially when you're open and vulnerable like that and sharing this information.

For friends and family who you know just don't resonate with this, I just won't even discuss it with them. Don't even worry about it. They're not going to necessarily change their ways. Although, if you are seeing somebody who just doesn't quite understand how it works . . . Oftentimes, I get that kind of reaction from people, I'm like, “No, you don't understand. How often do you just recommend things to your friends? All the time. And what better recommendation than one that comes from a trusted friend? If I can be the person who honestly tells people how a product works and to show people the ins and outs of it so they can make an informed, educated decision, and at no extra cost to them . . . Literally, I'm not charging them anything more; Amazon is the company that's paying me for educating these customers who would not be customers if it wasn't for me. It's a win for everybody. It's a win for Amazon because they're getting new customers, it's a win for the customer because they're getting a product that they know will help them, and then it's a win for me too as a byproduct of helping people.” That's how I would explain it. If people can´t understand that, well that's their own problem. It's too bad that they don't understand the opportunities that are out there and available to them as well. You don't waste time with negativity.

But on the other side of that, you definitely want to surround yourself with people who understand and who know the language that you're speaking and who can be there to hold you accountable, but also help you and encourage you along the way, which is why I hope you're a part of the SPI community on SmartPassiveIncome.com/community. It's a Facebook group with over 31,000 people who are all speaking the same language. We're all together in this. A lot of people join that group and really feel like a lot of the people in there are almost like friends and family because well, they are friends, but almost like family because they are people who know about this world and who can understand.

Often times, the people who are closest to us don't even realize how this all works until, sometimes, when success starts coming in. Or just maybe it never happens. But again, point being, surround yourself with amazing people who understand what you're doing, who show the same values, who can speak the same language. SmartPassiveIncome.com/community: if you go there just click to join and somebody on my team or an admin or myself will approve you and we'll see and love to get to know you. That's for you Jackie. That's for everybody else out there. Yeah, keep on going, though. You're rocking it.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you, Jackie. I'll send you an AskPat teeshirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well, just head on over to AskPat.com, and you can ask right there on that page. Cheers. Thanks so much, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye for now.

Wait, before I go, here's a quote, as I always give at the end of these episodes, and this quote is from John Elliott Jr. “Big ideas are so hard to recognize, so fragile, so easy to kill. Don't forget that, all of you who don't have them ” Guys, take care. I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.