As an entrepreneur, there have been very few holidays where I haven’t worked at least a few hours, and this day in 1998 was no different. I went into my home office that morning planning to spend a few casual hours–on nothing in particular. It was a holiday after all and no one else on my staff at the time was working. So it was just going to be a relaxing day where I’d let my mind have a break from the typical daily grind.
I remember at the time that Affiliate programs were becoming a big deal, thanks to the Internet, which made it very easy to track sales using affiliate links. Numerous big-name companies were now employing affiliate programs as a part of their marketing strategy. And I thought…why not us, too!
I remember being particularly impressed with Amazon.com’s affiliate program. The word was, they had 60,000 affiliates. 60,000! At the time, that number seemed enormous to me, an impossible number. But I couldn’t have been more wrong of course because, in just a couple years, we would be experiencing days where we’d sign up over 60,000 affiliates in a single day!
But on this morning, I was simply sketching out a few basics on how our affiliate program would work. At the time, we were publishing our magazine, Six Figure Income, which featured exclusive interviews with home-based entrepreneurs who were earning at least $100,000 annually from their business. This magazine was essentially our one and only product. By the way, it’s from the magazine’s name that the SFI Marketing Group name came to be (a few years later we changed the initials to stand for Strong Future International to better align with our vision for the program).
