Devoted to the Multi-level marketing (or MLM) industry

There has been some debate about evangelism and affiliates and I wanted to address some of the excellent comments made to a post I wrote about Church of the Customer missing the mark on the subject.

Ann Michael writes:

Susan Reynolds writes: Mark Alan Effinger writes:

I say Evangelist when I love what I share, in advance of receiving any compensation. I do it for love, baby!

I'm not down on Affiliates at all. I believe it's the foundation for great business.

I just believe that evangelists do what we do regardless of the compensation (and if you've read your Napoleon Hill, you realize that eventually it all comes back to you in some form. It's called "The Law of Compensation", right?).

In my opinion, Evangelism and Affiliates can co-exist.

• You can be an evangelist who later becomes an affiliate. A good example would be a person that enjoys a product so much that they decide to become affiliated with the product or idea. You would be an evangelist whether you get paid to be one or not. Getting paid to promote something you truly love is icing on the cake.
  
• You can be an affiliate that has such an incredible experience with a product that you become a true evangelist. You originally became an affiliate for the money, but later your belief in the product or idea far outweighs any monetary compensation and you would continue your evangelism with or without the money.

Then of course we have pure affiliates that could care less about the product or idea and they only promote the idea or product because they are paid to do so. I like to call them pimps.