 Hi, I'm George Kau and I am a recovering affiliate marketer. Let me explain. In the first couple years of my business, I made a lot of money doing affiliate marketing. This was how I made most of my money in the first couple years, like probably 90% of it. And what I mean by affiliate marketing is there are other people who have already built audiences, they built it different ways that would probably love your product or service or program. And instead of, or in addition to you building your own audience, why don't you just go to other people who already have audiences and ask them to promote your product or service or program and in return you pay them a commission based on the sales. So that's what affiliate marketing basically is. I made most of my money from 2009 to 2012 of doing it that way. Now, I burned out. Why did I burn out and why did I eventually talk, stand against affiliate marketing? And I'll tell you about that and then I'll tell you why I'm back to a more moderate position and what I think authentic affiliate marketing is. Okay, so why I burned out is that the affiliate marketing world is very shark-like. It's very money-driven. It's all about not leaving money on the table. You got to make every possible scent possible because if somebody clicks on a link and you're just promoting somebody else without getting a commission, then you should be getting a commission for it and everything should be monetized. And the problem I have with that is, well, now I've realized the problem there was I was so greedy and so fearful and so money-driven that I was really looking at my audience as, oh, I'm going to have a bigger audience so I can get to make more money by them hearing my endorsements and clicking on my link. And it just started to feel very graspy. It's like always chasing and always not enough and no, don't want to leave money on the table. Well, I burned out because the relationships I was making in that industry was not genuine. We were just promoting each other. We didn't really care about each other's businesses. We never even really used each other's product. We couldn't even wholeheartedly vouch for each other's product. We were just promoting it for the money, for the audience growth and it wasn't genuine friendships. And you might say, well, this is business. No, no, no. I do business very differently now. I actually have business friends who actually care about me. I care about them. We occasionally promote each other, but most of our money is made selling our own products now, selling our own thing to our own audience. OK, so let me, this is why I burned out. This is why I kind of stood against affiliate marketing, also the price. So let me tell you the principles now of authentic affiliate marketing. I'm working these out right now. I'm open to your feedback and your suggestions. But the first principle is that you've got to be able to wholeheartedly vouch for somebody's product or service. So either you have used it and you really benefited from it personally, or you've had a lot of clients use it. And they all say this is really worthwhile and therefore you can honestly say to your audience, even though I haven't used it, my clients have and I thought you all should know about it. OK, so that's the first principle. Second principle is that you should let people know that you're getting an affiliate commission for it. And this is not just a principle, it's also the law. It's just part of the FTC legal because of the fact is we're all human beings and we are all susceptible to financial incentives. So if I am vigorously promoting something and I didn't tell you I was getting paid to do it, you know, am I being, there is no such thing as pure, there's no such thing as pure endorsement when you're getting paid for something because it's just it just it brings that picture in and it's OK to say, listen, I'm making money on this and you could say it in an authentic way. So for example, you could say, I believe in this product. I really believe in it. I've used it myself for my clients. I've used it and I've decided that I want to promote it now and become one of their affiliates. So they're a sponsor. You can call them a sponsor for your, you know, for your blog or for whatever or for your channel or for your, you know, they're a sponsor. Or you could say, hey, listen, when you buy the product through my link, right, you pay the same price as everybody else or maybe you even get a discount and in return, they pay me something if you end up buying it. So you're also supporting my business as well and I want to thank you for that, right. So you can do it that way. And so that's second principle, just be transparent about the commission you're receiving third is to wholeheartedly vouch for that other company's marketing that your audience is going to be seeing. Because if you're promoting somebody and they're joining someone's email list and you don't know what it's like to be that part of a person's email list, that might be a really bad experience. They might be using a lot of hype and scarcity and manipulation that you wouldn't vouch for, that you wouldn't want your audience to associate you with. But if you haven't joined that person's email list and experienced it yourself, how can you know, right? So you got to vouch for that person's marketing. Oh, okay, next principle is to only sparsely use affiliate marketing. Don't let it be a huge part of your finances because or I should say don't be promoting a lot of products. You can promote one product and make a lot of money from it, that's okay. But I think promoting a lot of products makes you look untrustworthy. You end up looking like a salesman. Like I don't know when to trust you because every link you have is an affiliate link. So you're incentivized by everything. Like you see what I mean? So for my, for example, if you go to my website and go to my tools page on my website, I have a list of dozens of tools that I use in my business. Software websites I use and I put at the top there. I used to have affiliate links for a bunch of these, but I'd taken all the affiliate links out. Now they're non-affiliate links. I promote them because I use them myself and I believe in them and I want their companies to succeed. That's it. Yes, I'm probably losing out on tens of thousands of dollars a year in not putting affiliate links there, but it's worth it to me because I have an audience that trusts me so much so that when I sell my own thing, my audience buys very eagerly and when I occasionally sell someone else's thing and I'm transparent, my audience also buys. That is worth way more than the $20,000 I could earn a year from having affiliate links on my website. So it is a good thing to leave money on the table. You have to, the trade-off is trust. So you have to look at the trade-off and see what's more worthwhile to you. To me it's trust and the trust has a long-term, huge long-term benefit from my business, but also just for my heart. It's just better for my heart. So, and then the final principle is that when it comes to your own income, if possible, sorry, when it comes to your own products, your own products, try not to make most of the products you create yourself and sell out there. If most of it is sold through affiliates and they're taking a huge chunk, like they're taking 50%, then the price of your product is inflated by definition because you're only getting 50% back and you are therefore really only able to deliver 50% of the value. Whereas when I sell most of my income from the products I sell that I've created myself, I earn 100% of it. So I'm incentivized to deliver you that 100% of the value. When I use affiliates to promote anything, I'm doing it because they're friends of mine and I want to support them financially. I want to give them 50%, even though I'm taking a lot less money than I would sell it myself. I want to help them out and they give me access to a new audience that I didn't have otherwise. So anyway, I hope these principles make sense. If you want more, I'm running out of time with this 10 minute limit on Instagram, but if you want more, go to my website, georgcal.com slash blog slash JV. JV stands for joint venture. georgcal.com slash blog slash JV and there's a whole long blog poster about all this stuff. I hope this helps and any comments, of course I'm always welcome and open to it. Take care. Thank you.