Category: MLM

Our next guest poster is AnnaLaura, from InterNetwork Marketing Wealth, with some tips on using the Internet for Network Marketing.

You may have already heard the term internetwork marketing but you might not know what it is. Internetwork marketing is the process of building a network marketing organization using the internet. So how do you do this effectively? The internet has so many options and opportunities that it can be easy to get lost or waste a lot of time with activities that are not productive.

1. Make a plan for how you are going to use the internet with your network marketing business. For example, are you going to write articles? How many? Create a blog? What will be the major theme or topic of your blog? Join social networking communities? Which ones?

2. Create a website that offers useful content to its visitors and positions you as either a network marketing expert, or a professional in the field in which you are representing yourself.

3. Develop a plan for how you will brand yourself online. For example, you will probably want to start a newsletter and I highly recommend registering yourname.com if it is available.

4. Decide who your target market is. Make sure to include the obvious such as other network marketers, and business opportunity seekers but you may also want to include less obvious groups of people such as teachers and librarians.

5. Commit to working on your internetwork marketing plan long term. Realize that you will not make a ton of money and achieve your goals overnight.

6. Have your long-term goals for your business and for your internet activities written down. Make sure they are specific and include timelines. For large projects also write down a list of the specific steps you will need to take to make it happen.

7. Enlist the help of others who have been there and done it. Research what you can online about internetwork marketing and ask for help from anyone who offers it. There is no need to re-invent the wheel or to waste time by failing to focus on what will work the best for you.

Building a network marketing organization via the internet can be fun and very profitable. It also takes time and a lot of work. If you are a technology oriented person then this may be a great option for you. Otherwise, know that it can be done, but you will need to have patience and it may take longer than you had hoped.

AnnaLaura Brown is a professional network marketer who builds her business online. She loves helping others read their goals and dreams. To learn more about her and subscribe to her newsletter visit InterNetwork Marketing Wealth.

In a rather surprising move, Marketing Pond, a popular downline builder for free money programs, has added its first paid program.

The program is Freebie Force. The site itself provide access to information on savings you can get for free. None of this information is secret, but the site collects it all in one convenient location for you to search.

For example, one of the current savings is information on how to get a free cooler at CVS stores. There’s also free software, electronics, hotel stays, etc.

Of course, the main focus of the site is rewarding you for referring others to it. They charge $9.95 a month for access to the freebies database. For everyone you refer, you get paid $1 a month, down 7 levels.

Freebie Force has the same disadvantage as most multi-level pay schemes, that you need your referrals to stay active and keep paying each month for you to earn. At least the site does provide information that can save a member more than the $9.95 fee every month, so it’s better than programs where you get nothing for your fee other than the right to refer others.

Up until now, Marketing Pond has been full of free programs (and has removed programs from the list when they stopped being free. So this is a bit of a departure, adding a paid program. It’ll be interesting to see how the membership reacts.

SBI! recently announced the start of their $22,500 Network Marketing Contest.

The basic idea is to use SBI! to build a site that monetizes, at least partially, through network marketing (e.g. MLMs). But to do so in a way that’s consistent with the basic SBI! philosophy of providing valuable content, and “keeping it real”.

As an example, a site that talks about the benefits of Amway would not be in that philosophy. A site that talked about the problems products (which you could, coincidentally, get at Amway) could solve, would. The ideal site doesn’t actually contain a link to the MLM program, but rather has a way to capture your own leads. You can then follow up with those leads directly and refer them to the MLM program.

The bible for the contest is Ann Seig’s The Renegade Network Marketer, which I mentioned yesterday is available to SBI! members for 50% off. The most exciting part about this contest is that Ann is providing free coaching to the contest entrants. Regular readers will know I consider good mentoring essential for online success, and here you get 12 months of it for free (well, for the cost of an SBI! membership if you don’t already have one).

To enter the contest, you must get your SBI! site by February 6th. If you’re already an SBI! member, and haven’t decided on a niche yet, you’re eligible if you signed up after August 6th, 2007.

Then build the best site you can to drive leads to your chosen MLM program, using the techniques outlined in the The Renegade Network Marketer and following SBI!’s Action Guide.

The winner is the one who earns the most from their site in the last three months of their first year of operation. So you have nine months to build traffic and perfect your techniques.

The winner will get the top prize of $10,000. Second and third prizes, respectively, are $3,000 and $2,500. There’s also $2,500 for the most creative use of online techniques (I’m especially interested to see what people come up with for this category…for some reason an image of dancing penguins comes to mind).

Finally, and the touch that reflects the philosophy behind the way SiteSell operates, there’s $2,500 for the person who contributes the most helpful advice on the contest thread to help other contestants succeed. So while it’s a competition, there’s also the cooperative aspect of it that pervades the SBI! member forums.

If you’re interested in reading the contest thread on the SBI! forums, contact me. I have a guest login I can share with a few readers, but that isn’t for public distribution.

Click here to get your SBI! site to enter the contest. There’s a 30 day money back guarantee if you start following the action guide and decide it’s not for you after all. After 30 days they’ll refund a pro-rated amount, so taking an extra 30 days to decide isn’t that big a deal.

Most people look for MLM programs to join based on the details of the program itself.

Typically they’re looking for a program that will let them profit with as little effort as possible, which is certainly attractive. So a forced matrix is good, since you can get spillover from your upline. High commissions on your first level are good, since that puts you into profit soonest. A typical setup is that when your first level is filled, you’ll be breaking even on your membership fees.

What most people don’t consider is the importance of your sponsor in the program.

A good sponsor is more than the source of potential spillover in a forced matrix. A good sponsor will offer you advice, encouragement, and support. A great sponsor will take direct action to help you succeed, knowing that your success is their success.

If you join an MLM program and your sponsor does not contact you, that’s a good sign that your sponsor doesn’t really care if you succeed or not. If someone else in your upline contacts you, that’s a good sign that your sponsor is relying on spillover from above. The person who did contact you is effectively your sponsor for the purposes of this article.

Here are some of the concrete actions a sponsor can take to help you succeed.

Offer Expert Advice

Your sponsor is, in a sense, more experienced than you if only because you joined the program under them. They no doubt have knowledge that can help you short-circuit some of the learning curve in the program, and should be willing to share that advice with you.

Offer Marketing Help

Your sponsor has shown an ability to get at least one referral, you. They should, at the least, be willing to let you know what has worked best for them. They may also provide you with access to splash pages they’ve used. A great sponsor will offer you a spot in a URL rotator that they send traffic to, to help you gain referrals through their marketing efforts.

Not Bombard You with Advertisements

A great sponsor will not send you advertisements about other programs to join. They may, now and then, point you to an opportunity that complements what you’re already doing, but they won’t try to get you to join every opportunity they’re in just to get referrals.

I try to model these actions with my referrals in any program I work. I’ve found that keeping referrals is easier if you show an interest in them and are seen to be trying to help them succeed. There’s nothing worse than joining a program and then feeling like you’re on your own to succeed or fail.

Apparently standard multi-level marketing matrices are old hat, because more companies are using powerlines these days.

A powerline is basically a single line of people, in roughly the order that they joined the company. The marketing hype for powerlines says that you can earn from everyone under you in the powerline. Since the powerline continues to grow as new members join, this sounds like a great deal. You don’t have to hope for spillover from your sponsor, instead everyone who joins after you is automatically under you.

The trick with companies that use powerlines is to read carefully the details of the commissions you get from the powerline.

MyWorldPlus, for example, features “infinity bonuses”. These are the commissions you earn on everyone below you in the powerline, down to infinity. But not really, because it’s only down to the next person who qualifies for your level of bonus. They rate members from 0 stars to 5 stars, based on how valuable you are to the company (presumably how many people you’ve referred, or sales volume you’ve generated). So as a 1 star member you earn commissions down the powerline until you get to the next member who is 1 star or above. This is only really useful if you get up to 4 and 5 stars.

Without the infinity bonus, you earn commissions from the 5 members below you. That’s right, you only earn commissions on 5 people. And the total is a whopping 14%.

Vocalix Direct is another company that uses powerlines. Vocalix Direct just launched recently, and their web pages are vague on the exact commissions earned from the powerline. Since they push you to upgrade to a paying membership to lock in your spot in the powerline, not having details on the commissions you’ll earn is a bit suspicious. They have plenty of details on what you earn from your sales of their product, and from your personal referrals, but no numbers on the powerline commissions.

Powerlines sound great, since you have a continually growing downline, but in practice earning any significant money just from being in the powerline is not going to happen. Yet that is typically how these schemes are marketed.

If you find a company using powerlines and think their offer sounds great, be sure to check the actual numbers for commissions so you know at what point you’ll break even on your membership fees.

Downline Partners is a downline builder program.

If you’re not familiar with downline builders, they provide a collection of MLM opportunties that you join. You then promote the downline builder, and your referrals go under you in all the MLM opportunities in the collection. Marketing Pond is a downline builder for free money programs.

Downline builders also provide a sense of community that’s sometimes missing from MLM programs. You’re not joining alone, hoping to hear from your sponsor, you’re joining with everyone else in the downline builder. You have fellow members to ask questions of if you get stuck or need help.

Downline Partners focuses on paid programs. At first glance, I took the site for the typical downline builder. After joining I found several features of the site that are worth a second look.

The first feature is the ability to sponsor a new opportunity. When you sponsor a new opportunity, you are the top of the matrix for anyone else in the site who joins that opportunity. This can be powerful, and as such is reserved for those who promote Downline Partners (you need 50 referrals to sponsor a program).

Another innovative feature is their discussion forum. It uses something they call company codes, instead of referral links. I can link to a specific forum post, such as this one talking about the benefits of Kiosk, and you’ll see normal looking forum posts between members of Downline Partners.

Notice in the messages there are various referral links that all have my ID in them. What’s happened is that when the posts were written, instead of placing referral links, the authors placed company codes such as $$kiosk$$. When the forum is viewed through my member link, those company codes get replaced with my referral link for the program.

This is a powerful technique. You can advertise the forum in whatever way you want, using your member link, and if someone joins any of the programs, or Downline Partners, you’ll get the referral. There may be other programs using this technique, but this is the first time I’ve run across it.

Downline Partners has another unusual marketing tool.

Referral TV is a collection of videos in an embedded viewer. Here’s their collection of Great Tricks videos. Note the ads on the right. Each has my referral link for that program, at least for those programs I chose to join.

You can always choose not to join some of the programs right away, which is a nice feature. With paid programs you can’t usually afford all of them in a downline builder. Making them optional means you can build one income up to the point of being able to afford the others.

There’s also a rich collection of splash pages for you to use in your advertising, and program specific pages.

Of course, there’s also a paid upgrade option. With a paid upgrade of $5 per month, you can place your own links in your member pages. For example, in any of the pages linked above, toward the bottom will be sponsor links. When you pay for a sponsor link, your link shows up for any of your referrals, or for people you send to your member links.

As a bonus for paying the upgrade fee, you get put into the Downline Partners’ rotator until you get a free referral. This is a bit of a gamble. If the person you get is already in all the programs, you won’t get anything from them. If they’re not, and choose to join one of the MLM programs, you may get your $5 back from the referral commissions.

All in all, Downline Partners is a cut above the other downline builders I’ve seen. Clearly, some thought has gone into providing better promotional tools than the competition.

I hadn’t intended to get involved in another downline builder, but I think I’ll stick around this one.

Entertainment 4 Less (E4L) is an MLM in the prelaunch phase.

A pretty common tactic in a prelaunch phase is to offer heavily discounted memberships. E4L took this tactic to the extreme, offering free lifetime memberships. The reason an MLM company does this is to build a large base of members. It’d be pretty embarrassing to launch and only have a couple of people buying the product. By having a prelaunch phase and discounting (or giving away) memberships, the company gets a lot of people who are emotionally invested in the company’s success. They’ll stay in and buy when the time comes, because they hope to make money.

The basic product at E4L is discounted media and equipment: DVD movies, video games, home theater equipment, etc. When they launch, that’s the sort of thing you’ll be able to buy. And you’ll earn a commission when your referrals purchase.

E4L uses a 3×7 forced matrix, so you’ll get some spillover from your sponsors. You earn commissions on purchases from anyone under you in that matrix. They also do a 100% matching bonus for your direct referrals. If a direct referral of your earns $100 in a month, you get a bonus of $100 that month.

Like most free membership programs, E4L has an upgrade option (they call it a VIP upgrade). This gives you a discount on MLM leads and customer signups. Customer signups are people who found E4L not through a sponsor link but through the website directly, or through E4L’s own advertising, and are looking to buy products, not make money (I’m not sure how they determine this). These people count as your personally sponsored referrals. The cost is currently $150 for 25.

So, is E4L a legitimate opportunity?

It’s far too early to tell. The idea of a discount media club could take off, or could flop. The main benefit to getting in now is that it’s free, and if you don’t want to do anything more than get spillover from your sponsor you can join and forget about it. If it becomes popular, you might earn something from it.

You can see the web page here. Click on the “Make Money EZ” link across the top for the details, such as they are, of how the commissions work.

What do you think? Is this a legitimate opportunity or a scam waiting to happen?

After my review of Bigorilla web hosting, I started thinking about how their commission structure was designed to make the founders money, not the affiliates.

So it makes sense to create your own web hosting MLM, so that you are the founder. And here’s how.

First step is to secure the web hosting for a large number of affiliates. Go to Hostland.com and click on the “Reseller Hosting” link. You can get 5,000 websites for $50 a month. If you want to be generous and offer MySQL databases to your affiliates, that’s an extra $50 a month. We’ll assume we’re going all out and paying $100 per month.

We’ll take one of those 5,000 sites and setup our main MLM page. We’ll also install some scripts that we can offer to our affilites, such as URL rotators, autoresponders, etc. We can get those scripts for free, and modify them as needed (throughout this, I’m assuming you have a partner proficient in PHP coding).

So we have our product we’re going to charge $19.95 a month for. Before we can actually sign up affiliates, we need some software for keeping track of the downlines. We can get this for free, or pay for a more professional version. We’ll splurge and pay $69 a month for MLM Software Pro, and our partner will integrate it with Hostland’s billing software.

Our total cost per month is $169, plus our time.

Let’s assume we have a commission structure like Bigorilla. 15 levels deep, making $1 on your first level, $0.75 on your second, and so on. The first people we recruit pay $19.95 a month, but we get all of that. If we use a 2x force matrix, we’d have two people on the first level, for $39.90. If we can fill out the second level, that’s 4 more people at $18.95 (we give $1 to their sponsors). Our grand total is now $115.70. We need just 3 more people at the third level to break even.

Even when we get down 15 levels, we’re still making $10 per person. By the time we get to 5,000 members, we’re making more than $50,000 a month, and can easily afford to invest in a dedicated server or two to raise the quality of our web hosting. Granted, I doubt we’d get to 5,000 members, but anything past 9 is pure profit.

I’m not entirely serious about this, but looking at the numbers from the founder’s point of view helps to illustrate why the best MLM programs give generous commissions to their members. There’s simply a lot of money to be made by running an MLM opportunity, and it doesn’t make sense to not give your members as much of it as possible. Skimp on them and they’ll leave, and you’ll watch your nice large matrix evaporate from the bottom up.

Bigorilla provides web hosting and Internet marketing tools (URL rotators, shortened URL service, capture pages and autoresponders). Priced at $19.95 a month, they’re not out of line with what other services charge for the same mix of tools.

Bigorilla is also an MLM opportunity, and that’s what I’ll review here.

They use a 2×15 forced matrix (each person has 2 people on their first level, you get paid commissions down to 15 levels). As a forced matrix, you will get people placed under you from the efforts of the people above you. This is attractive to many people who aren’t good at recruiting, and in Big Gorilla you don’t need to have enrolled anyone to earn commissions.

While a 2×15 matrix looks good in the earnings chart (over $30,000 a month), the difficulty of filling it completely cannot be overstated. That’s over 20,000 people on the 15th level who are not earning a commission right away. The two components needed to keep people involved in an MLM program when they aren’t earning commissions are:

1. The prospect of breaking even with relatively few referrals
2. Providing a service they’re willing to pay for anyway

From a marketing perspective, there are a lot of things Bigorilla is doing well. They offer a 21 day free trial to get you into the system. What they don’t emphasize is that as a 21 day free trial member, you cannot earn commissions on people under you. Anytime someone signs up after you they send you an email telling you that they signed up, and reminding you that you need to upgrade to lock in your position in the matrix.

This is an effective way of building tension, and they’ve combined that with a trial upgrade offer of 25 cents a day for some relatively short period of time (5 or 7 days, I think). Since you can lock in your position for only 25 cents a day, you lose little by upgrading and seeing if you get more people under you before you have to start paying the $19.95 a month.

Given a 15 level deep commission structure, there simply isn’t that much commission to go around at each level. You get $1 for people on your first level, then $0.75 for your second level, and dropping down to $0.25 on level 9. In a nice twist, they start to go back up at that point, getting back up to $1 at the bottom level. By my calculations, they’ve only used about half of a member’s monthly fees in commissions, leaving $10 for Big Gorilla.

While a 15 level deep commission structure sounds like good earning potential, more important for the success of an MLM company is how quickly a single person can break even on their membership fee. The best programs let you break even after 2 or 3 referrals. In Big Gorilla, you have to have about 70 people under you to break even.

Bigorilla does let you earn commissions without having enrolled anyone personally. What they don’t mention until you’re a member is that the commission levels I described above are only for people who do have at least one personal referral. With no personal referrals, you get a flat 10 cents per person on any level. At that rate you need about 200 people under you to break even.

Bigorilla’s marketing is terrific, and the use of emails about people signing up for you combined with the 25 cents a day lock in rate is very effective. But unless you need the Internet marketing tools they provide, and are willing to pay full price for them without any expectation of breaking even on MLM referrals, I’d give Bigorilla a pass.

Note that if you do sign up for Bigorilla, and later want to cancel, you must go to PayPal in order to cancel your monthly payment subscription. Bigorilla will not refund any monies paid to them by your failure to cancel your subscription at PayPal.

When I first ran across the Daily Pay Guarantee website, my first thought was that it was a typical landing page full of hype and an opportunity to bypass.

They claim that you can “make up to $1,000 a day with no sponsoring, guaranteed”. They convey the essence of wealth with a picture of a Mercedes Benz, and say you’ll “get paid within the next 24 hours guaranteed”. This sounds great! Clicking the button to find out more takes you to a signup page. There’s also a FAQ link across the top.

The FAQ has the details of what’s going on. Basically, you pay an initial registration fee of either $250 or $100, and then pay $5 a day thereafter. If you pay the $250 registration fee, they put people under you automatically. If you pay the $100 registration fee, you have to recruit your own downline. The FAQ doesn’t say what percentage you get from your downline.

The FAQ is quick to reassure you that this is not a pyramid scheme. Daily Pay Guarantee also brings in money through a search engine, traffic exchange, and safe list (which you are agreeing to be on by joining). No mention of how much of that money goes to members.

At this point, Daily Pay Guarantee has raised all my red flags for an MLM opportunity:

1. Unrealistic promises of success with no work put into it
2. Members pay into the system to support those above them
3. No actual product or service that members are getting for their daily fee
4. No details of how downline commissions work
5. The website contradicts itself in places and is unprofessional

My normal reaction would have been to close the browser window and forget about Daily Pay Guarantee. It’s almost certainly a recipe for losing money. But it’s also the sort of thing that would appeal to someone new to making money online who is desperate to escape from a day job. That’s just the sort of person I started this blog to help.

So against my better judgment I paid the $250 registration fee and signed up. I picked the $250 amount because if I was going to review the opportunity, I’d review the option that would most appeal to newcomers to MLM and Internet marketing.

Things went downhill from there. According to emails I received, I should have two people assigned to my downline within hours. Instead, it took about a week and a half just for them to recognize that I’d upgraded from a free member to a “bronze” member. It took another day or two to get my first person assigned under me. I did no promotion of Daily Pay Guarantee (after all, I paid for them to do the work).

For a while they had a list of free and paid members on their website. By communicating with the person I had signed up under, I worked out their algorithm for assigning downlines, and knew exactly when my two people should have been assigned. When that point had passed, I started bugging them. I never actually did get an email answers, but eventually I got the one person put under me. That was a few days ago, and there’s no sign of a second. But as a result of my bugging them, they did take down the pages that showed the free and paid members, so other people wouldn’t be able to know when they’d screwed up.

I’m currently breaking even on the $5 a day. I’m not sure how that works, since I only have one person under me who is also paying $5 a day. But then they never really did say how the commissions work, so it’s hard to know if that’s right or not.

So, after giving Daily Pay Guarantee a try, my first impressions are confirmed. This is not a professionally run organization. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s just a couple of guys who know PHP coding.

Give this one a pass, along with any other MLM opportunity you find that has the same qualities. The only way you’ll make any money in this sort of program is to get in very early and get very lucky.

On the other hand, if you have $250 you can afford to spend in order to try and make money online, go over to Site 5 web hosting and give them $120 of it for two years’ web hosting under their $5 a month plan. That gets you 110 GB of storage, 5 TB bandwidth, and the ability to host 110 domains (this blog is hosted at Site 5).

Spend the other $120 on a nice logo or WordPress theme, and start blogging. After two years of blogging, you’ll probably be making more money through advertisements on your blog than you would be if you’d put the $250 into Daily Pay Guarantee.