What they're saying is, “There are not enough subscribers out there for me to make money, so I don't want to give mine away by promoting you.”

Then why the heck are you doing affiliate marketing anyway if you're not going to properly promote other people?

I would rather someone have a 400-part email autoresponder follow-up sequence in place so that as soon as I drive traffic to a squeeze page they sign-up and are hammered until they either buy or leave that list. I would rather have that any day of the week because your long-term responsiveness will increase because of the follow-up.

Do I follow up with people when they opt in to my sequences? Yes, like crazy! There are ten or 12 emails in that series that people get when they opt in.

There are other reasons to do it this way. For example, you can train your list to opt in to other people's lists, and therefore, the better results you're going to get long-term. If you can get your list to opt into squeeze pages on a regular basis, then every time you have a teleseminar and everything else, you're going to get higher conversion ratios on squeeze pages from people in your list.

Your list will be trained to convert. I believe that is one of the reasons that I do so well—I do that relentlessly.

Whenever I'm giving business advice to people I say, “You're going to have a product and you're going to sell through affiliates and affiliates are going to drive traffic—you're dumb not to have a squeeze page.”

You're dead stupid if you don't have a squeeze page in front of that, in my opinion. Maybe at some point that will change for some reason, but right now I live and breathe it.

When you're congruent that way and when you'll promote someone else's squeeze page, when it comes time for you to have a product, then you can just go to those same people who you promoted their squeeze page for and say, “I'd like you to promote my product and here's why: You should definitely go ahead and drive traffic to the squeeze page because I'll do great follow-up just like you did.”

If you do this, you'll end up working with people who are good at list building instead of people who are just out to make a buck or sell some product. List building is building a long-term relationship with people. No matter which way you cut it, that is the deal.