Screw Soylent Green, Marketing is PEOPLE

The Soylent Green DVD

I, like many of you, get invited to join affiliate programs regularly. It’s part of the business, and more often than not the answer is “No.” This is no exception, but for all you affiliate managers out there, please take note: This is the worst way to ask someone to join your affiliate program.

Don’t worry, Mr. Anonymous affiliate manager, who is likely working in a cubicle at Dunder Mifflin Paper Company in Scranton…I won’t spill the beans on who you are nor your company, mum’s the word.

I just thought I’d share this as a public service announcement. This is what it said:

I responded in several ways, and to this guy’s credit, he did apologize. What I’m putting “on blast” is not this guy per se, nor his company, but this un-thinking fashion of trying to make a sale apart from any sort of realization that you are NOT dealing with pixels, electrons, a QWERTY nor Google’s algorithm: none of those things “buy” or “sell” a thing.

It’s PEOPLE. (Not Soylent Green.) When you’re dealing with peeps, you have GOT to step your game up, consider your audience, and by reason of the fact that YES I DO HAVE 8 KIDS, doesn’t it strike you that…I dunno…I love the daylights out of my kids??

Secondly – who’s “Daniel”? Oh! Right. You read my recent Daniel Tan interview and realized there was someone on the planet named “Daniel…”

I think the first clue was that the name of my email address…you know, “JAMES” @ this domain name, was another clue…or that there are 20k instances on the web with the name “JamestheJust on Elance”…or that every post is signed as “JamestheJust”…

Name’s James. Yes! I am cranky – I love my kids, my humungoid family – and yes, I realize we’re a bit “odd” by today’s standards, but read my About page and discover (egads!) that I’m a Christian, I love my family, and I’m not “pulling my hair out” because I have a houseful of the best peeps on Earth – no offense, other peeps.

Here’s the lesson: don’t “invite” affiliates with a “personal” email if you don’t bother to consider your audience nor to make it **personal** — Sales is all about *the audience*… And the audience = human beings, with real FAMILIES, worldviews, convictions, needs…the whole nine.

Consider that when you fire off an email, when you make content, when you article market, when you write something — anything! The reason is: your words actually *matter* at some point, they *impact* and collide with genuine brains, minds and hearts – I don’t care if all that sounds cheesy, just listen.

If your sales are down, if your sites have tanked, if your affiliate program needs more sales people behind it…realize: at the end of the day, you’re not

// PUSHING PRODUCT //

you are

\\CONNECTING WITH PEOPLE\\.

Fail to do that, and you fail. MARKETING IS PEOPLE.