A New Paradigm, Totally Transparent Path to Promoting Others

Once you’ve been in business for a while, you will begin to receive lots of opportunities to promote other people and their work to your clients, your fans, your community.

When I owned my law firm (and even when I was an associate in a big law firm), I was heavily courted by insurance guys, financial advisors, CPAs and others like them who wanted to reach my clients.

Once I began appearing in the media, I was asked for mentions in articles and on the radio and TV.

Now that I have an online business, asks come in the form of requests to be an affiliate, for a solo email to my list, a blog post, a mention on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, or to participate in an event.

It can be overwhelming if you don’t have a system for determining when to say yes and when to decline.

And I’m still working on figuring out how I can say yes to more as well as evolving my own filtering system as I evolve in my business and my own awareness of what’s right for me.

In the past, my filtering system was a combination of whether I’d make money, whether I was friends with the person, whether I hoped they would promote me back, and whether I thought it was something great for my clients.

With new awareness, I can see that half this filtering system was based on ego/fear/worry, the exact things I do not want to rule my life or my decisions.

Will I make money and will someone promote me back are not the motivators I want my life to be based upon.

Whether something is great for my clients and whether I sincerely genuinely like and respect the person I’m promoting are the only two filters I want to have in place.

Today, I have successfully eliminated the “will they promote me back motivation”, which feels great.  But, money is still at least partially in the equation.

It’s not ALWAYS a factor.  For example, I refer people to Jolette, Tim, Craig and Russell all the time without any compensation.

But, I’m not doing solo mailings to my list for them unless there is a financial return and I’m feeling into whether that is ready to shift too.  I’ll be recreating my editorial calendar when we do Module 5 of the Money Map program this go round and I’m feeling I’ll have more clarity about that then.

Right now, all my solo mailings in the near future are reserved for people who supported the Money Map launch as affiliates.  We agreed to reciprocal mailings and now it’s time to fulfill on our promises.  Sadly, I have heard about lots of online business owners who do not fulfill on their reciprocal mailing promises and I can feel for them, but I will not be them.  Which means my list will be receiving regular solo mailings over the next several weeks about those people.

My conundrum is that there are several people who currently have launches happening that I want to share with my community (you), but I do not want to burn my list out or be sending so many mailings about other people’s programs that y’all get confused.

So here’s what I’m thinking.

I’ll write about each one of these programs here on the blog and tell you why I’m promoting it based on the criteria I shared earlier so you know exactly what’s behind my thinking.

I will not send you out an email about these posts (other than as a summary in my weekly email letter), so if you want to make sure you get to read what I have to say about the programs being launched right now, subscribe to my RSS feed.

Here are some of the programs that are on my radar right now:

Hiro Boga’s How to Rule Your World

A preliminary peek looks amazing for those of you that are ready to take personal responsibility seriously in your life.

A quote from the course: “It emerges from your relationship to wholeness, and it carries with it the responsibility to govern your inner kingdom wisely, to cultivate your gifts and talents, and to contribute to the creation of the world in which you live.”  She goes on to say “The only way to do this to consciously engage with the frictions and challenges the gifts and opportunities of daily living.  You can’t cultivate spiritual qualities by ignoring your feelings, or by transcending the rub of everday life.”

This is for you truth warriors out there who are ready to wake up to another level of awareness.  You can buy it right here.  When you do, Hiro will send me a check, but this is one of those programs I’d be referring no matter what – check or no check.  Hiro’s work is THE work that will change the world.

Max Simon’s Affiliate Tribe

I haven’t had much of a chance to check out Max’s program, but he is a long-time friend and past client so I know his work and it looks like he has something very interesting happening here.  I can’t tell you yet what I really think about it because I have not seen the course, but I will make time to really take a look in the next week or so.

In the meantime, you can check it out for yourself here and if you feel like writing a guest blog post about it for my blog, I’d post it if the write up was honest, compelling and helpful for the community.  And I’d even give you a percentage of the affiliate commissions.  (This could be a great opportunity for someone who wants to do the work of asking for a review copy of the program, reviewing the program and writing an honest assessment of it before it launches – I have no idea if any of this is possible in terms of the dates of Max’s launch, but tweet me if you want to try.)

Max’s Pre-Launch Content for the Affiliate Tribe is here.

Eben Pagan’s Self Made Wealth

Eben is brilliant and while I have not made the time to go through his entire Self Made Wealth Course, I did buy a 2-acre farm after reading his free report’s last time he launched the program and I’ve made massive internal shifts about the way I think about money and available resources.

I’m not sure if these shifts are related and I am interested in getting into the program and finding out if my new money awarenesses (specifically around the money shadow and the use of credit/debt) are aligned with Eben’s course, so I’ll let you know once I dive in to the course.

In the meantime, you can get some free videos, reports, and exercises on Eben’s Self Made Wealth Pre-Launch Blog.  If you buy from this link when he opens enrollment, I will receive a hefty affiliate check, so please do use my link if you are going to buy anyway.  I believe it’s last link clicked gets the credit, so use mine please.

Check out Eben’s Self Made Wealth program.

Anastasia Netri and Sage Lavine (formerly Laura Rice) and Jenn August (who I have not met)  are launching a membership program that I’m super intrigued about.  It’s for spiritual woman entrepreneurs.  And they are hosting a call about it on January 26, 2011 at 2p PT in which they are going to talk about the 5 Keys to Having a Spiritually Fulfilling, Financially Prosperous Business.  If you join their membership program from this link, I will receive a sweet little check from them every month.

So if you are going to do it anyway, I’d love it if you use this link to take a look:

Check out the call for Spiritual Women Entrepreneurs.

I think those are all the major programs on my radar at this very moment.  My Powerful Feminine Leader client Elizabeth Purvis just closed registration for her Goddess Business School, but if you are intrigued by the idea of it, get on her list for future notifications.  You can do that here.

So, what are your criteria for promoting other people’s stuff?  How much does money come into the equation?  What about reciprocity?  Friendship?  I’ll assume that you only promote things that you really believe will be the best ever for your people, so I won’t even ask about that.  And if that’s not your #1 criteria, make it that now.

That’s new paradigm principle #1 – Love first, always.  So, what say you?