Hi. I wonder if you can help me. I went on job interview and met one of these "internet gurus" by accident. Well, after viewing his blog etc.. I felt like this might be a good opportunity.
I was barraged with all this internet advertising. I have tried to just say to myself that I would just pay for information and see if there is something besides all the hype.
I find people who try to get your email address so they can build their lists. It seems like like MLM on steroids via the internet. Can people make money on the internet?
It appears that they learn from other people that are successful, buy what they recommend and then do just what they do. DO you have any insight to all this?
I feel some of them seem to be "disingenuous", The jury is still out.
I appreciate you volunteering your time to help out some of the confusion out there.
ANSWER: Very, very few people make money on the Internet with MLM, but many. many try.
The key to making money on the web with a website or blog is traffic to your website. The key to making money on the web with MLM is your mailing list.
You get traffic to a website or blog by writing content using keywords that people most often do a search on. You also get traffic to a website by having links to your site on other high traffic websites and finally by placing ads with search engines like Google, MSN, AOl, and Yahoo, which can be expensive.
MLM sites use advertising sites that search engines penalize you for like pay-to-click, click exchange, auto-surf, and email ads. As a reult, their search engine traffic never gets real high and they are forced to have a big mailing list of people that they sell things to over and over. Each new program looks better than the first. MLM is really a pyramid scheme with only the people towards the top making money. You can get towards the top by spending money and building your list over a four year period of time.
In both cases, with as normal site or blog and an MLM site you have banners or links that offer things that you get paid for selling. You can also monetize a website or blog by publishing ads from other companies like Google, etc. When people click on the ads, you get anywhere from a penny up to $5. Google and the other top search engines that pay the most don't normally allow their ads to appear on MLM sites. You may see them for a while, but they usually get their accounts canceled.
As in most of life, whenever something costs money, the objective is to take it out of your pocket and put it in someone else's.
If you want to build an online business that you don't have to constantly struggle with, start with an affiliate program tat offers good products to people or start your own website or blog and write it correctly.
This will give you access to some free books about the subject. Brad Callen's books have the most valuable information in them. http://ewebsmith.com/nl051407.html
Thank you for your help. One follow-up I have is that some of these guys claim that I can make a good profit margin, by promoting their products. This I believe is what you refer to as affiliate marketing.
Are people actually coming up with new ideas, or is there a lot of spin and all they do is repackage the same ideas?
Answer Glenn,
What I refer to as affiliate marketing is when you basically get paid an 8% to 15% commission for selling someone's quality product or service like telecom services, clothes, jewelry, flowers, etc. You can make 50% or more selling information products from places like clickbank.com. These are basically ebooks or ehow-to manuals that are normally pretty short and sell in the neighborhood of $25 - $50. Some of them are valuable and entertaining. Most of the information that they provide can be found on the web for free, but so can most of the stuff in text books. Many of them are not worth the disk space they take up.
What they refer to as MLM now also provides a high margin, but the products usually center around making money fast and they are usually variations of the same schemes. The money that is made comes from selling the program as opposed to the program its self. The deal is, you buy my stuff, then you try to resell it, if you do I make more money, if you don't, I still have your money and I will be constantly sending you emails to try to get you to buy my next big deal.
Multi-level marketing has been around almost since mankind and it usually involves something of value that people use or eat. Farmers would sell their produce to traveling merchants who would sell it to stores, who would sell it to the population. The Romans and the Vikings established MLM along their trade routes. MLM is not a bad term , but it has been turned into a bad term by these guys who adopted it to help disguise their pyramid schemes.
