My Marketing Info
I vaguely remember when the Internet started getting flashy websites and graphical images. I remember being a beta tester of the first AOL software and I remember losing out on a lot of opportunities in the early days of the graphical Internet and domain names. What I also remember is spending hours searching on AOL, Yahoo, and Hotbot (now owned by Lycos – this was before Google’s time) trying to find ways to make money online. I did the typical thing that many others did, sending SPAM (this was before they had a name for it), trying to get people to click on porn ads so I could rack a few cents per click on my Geocities web page, and much more.
It took me a while to learn how to legitimately make money online. I scrapped all of my notions of what I should be doing, stopped looking at what everyone else was doing, and started thinking on my own terms. I started contacting companies to sell their products using form-filled code so they knew where the purchase came from. This later became known as affiliate marketing. Now, I am not pulling an Al Gore on you – I did not invent affiliate marketing, this was just something I did before someone else came up with a name for it and became widely spread.
I also was really keen on direct sales (aka network marketing, referral marketing, multi-level marketing, etc) because of the allure that the average person could make good money for little effort other than recruiting a few others. Now, MLM got a bad name starting way back in the Amway days, but new companies put a different spin and it worked – for a very small percentage of the people. I got my initial hook when I was about 16 and started selling Excel, which at the time was a heavy hitter in the MLM world. I did pretty well with it and secured a lot of customers. I then got a notice that I could no longer get paid because they realized I was only 16 and not legally of age to sell it – that is another story for a different day though. I tried other companies and did okay, flopped with a few, and did really great with others. It was not until I hit my late 20′s that I realized what it really took to make a successful company…
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing in its most generic version is using your skills to drive traffic to another website to create sales. Now, this has been slowly drawn into separate fields over the past few years and dives into the realm of PPC (Pay Per Click), PPL (Pay Per Lead), and PPS (Pay Per Sale). Different people have different names and the only one that is truly “uniform” is PPC. Pay Per Click means that you get paid for every click. When someone visits your website and clicks on an ad that brings them to another website – you get paid. On PPS items, you actually have to convert that to a sale to get paid. The advantages of PPS over PPC is that PPS generally pays much better, however, for high traffic sites with low conversions, a PPC campaign is much better. If you have ever seen “Google Ads” on websites and clicked on one – you just helped them make money on their website and the person (or company) that received the click had to pay for it.
What makes a good MLM company?
I get this question a lot. I first start off by saying that any company has the chance of being great if they are in it for the right reasons. Companies that have made it through the years such as Avon have done so by providing a quality product at a reasonable price. They do so with less emphasis on recruiting and more on product sales. Companies that push heavy to recruit will generally make a handful of people a lot of money and everyone else just gets a bad taste in their mouth – some literally.
The main ingredient for a potentially successful MLM company is a quality product at a competitive price. It is okay if the product is a little more expensive ONLY if it is of better quality. Any time you see a company that produces a product that can be bought anywhere for much less and offers no significance in quality – will fail. Period, end of story.
When evaluating a MLM company, you should look at the product. Would you pay that price for that product if there were no monetary incentive to you for doing so? If the answer is yes – you are probably good to go. The next question is – can you easily sell this product to others without them feeling pressured to buy? If the answer is yes, move on. The third question is If others see you selling it, would they be curious to get more information on how they could sell it or buy it for cheaper?
Direct sales is a great way to make money. It is not much different than a retail store as long as their is a discount for you to sell retail. Many great companies go the direct sales route because they realize their marketing dollars are better spent in the hands of a huge sales force than in the hands of a television advertising agency. The downside to a truly great MLM is that you lose your customers to their own business – thank God you still get an override.
To see more information about projects I am currently working on, Click Here to see my marketing page.