Is This A Dirty Word? [EXPERT]

I can’t wait to hear your opinion.

After all, one person’s dirty is another person’s flirty. This is one word that gets such a rise out of people though I think it might really be a dirty word.

Clue Number One: It starts with A.

Now, before you run through all the swear words you know, this one has 9 letters.

It makes some people’s skin crawl.

It ends in an e.

When you say it, especially with healers and coaches, people walk…no RUN….the other way.

When I started using this word more routinely, I almost felt like looking over my shoulder to make sure a glory ball didn’t fly out of the heavens and strike me down. It definitely took some practice to let it become a part of my daily life, but I did it.

You see, I don’t know why I felt such aversion to a single word. I mean, who made the rule that this is was such a smarmy, alarming word?

Have you guessed it?

Let me whisper it to you….”a-f-f-i-l-i-a-t-e”.

What do you think? Does this word make your skin crawl? Don’t feel too bad, you are certainly not alone. When I attended my first “preview call” I was incredibly naive.

I actually believed that the strategy session offered as a valuable gift at the end of the call was a GIFT. I didn’t expect to be sold something. I didn’t know that if I bought a coaching product, the host of the preview call got a cut.

I felt foolish and beat myself up about that for quite a while.

Later when I began doing such preview calls myself, I always had a bad taste in my mouth from that first experience. My perceptions flavored my words and I always felt like I was pretending to be someone else.

Coached with scripts without much heart, I never felt comfortable with the whole system. Affiliate Partnering has never felt right to me. But Why Not?
Businesses stay in business only if they advertise.

People can’t pay you if they don’t know you exist, right? So you can buy advertizing in your community or on the internet community or you could pay people to spread word about your product or service.

Having an affiliate partner means that you are paying someone to tell people about your business. This person has a list of contacts who could potentially benefit from your product or service. Which begs the question…what’s wrong with that?

Why do heart based business owners have such an aversion to affiliate marketing? Seth Godin coined the phrase “Human Spam” and I like that term. I know you don’t want to bug people. You don’t want to clutter your contact’s email boxes with frivolous offers.

You don’t want to be a seen as a dreaded……sales person.

Well guess what? Get over yourself. If the word ‘affiliate’ makes your skin crawl, get a piece of paper out or sit right down at your keyboard and fill in this sentence:

Affiliate marketing bothers me because_________________.