Evaluating the 5 Pillars of Success

Michael Dlouhy, a charismatic salesman and seasoned network marketer, created a program called Mentoring for Free to help potential network marketers understand the MLM business. It includes an ebook called Success in 10 Steps with advice from his many years in the business along with weekly phone calls to keep his followers on the right path.

His devotees worship him as the modern day prophet of MLM success and they blindly follow every word he utters as if it is the word of God never straying from what they believe to be absolute truths about the network marketing business. Such cult-like devotion has been very profitable for Michael Dlouhy since he has been able to convince about 80% of his followers that the best network business for them is his own company, Vitamark, which sells vitamins, weight loss products and skin care products.

One of the tools he uses to funnel people into his business is called the 5 Pillars of Success. I decided to take a look at each of these “pillars”.

Pillar #1 is look for a company whose management has experience and integrity. That sounds reasonable enough yet how are you supposed to check this. It makes common sense that a network marketing company should have a team with experts both in network marketing and in running and funding a large business. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing from looking at a company prospectus if there is the proper synergy for success. I doubt that the average person thinking about starting a home-based business has the qualifications to do this evaluation.

Pillar #2 is to pick a company that has been around for 2 to 5 years because it has a better chance of succeeding. This seems like a reasonable recommendation. Yet by doing so, you may miss out on an opportunity to get onboard with an exciting company whose products or services you really believe in and with which you can make a lot of money. Longevity does not guarantee continued success. Consider the demise of seasoned companies like Arbonne and Excel Communications. Also, just because the company is successful, does not guarantee that YOU will be successful in it.

Pillar #3 is to pick a company with a remarkable product that stands out. This seems like a tall order for any company. Even Michael Dlouhy’s company has trouble meeting this pillar. What is remarkable about vitamins and skin care products? It seems like every other network marketing company is selling these same types of items. It is difficult to sustain retail sales on items such as vitamins, skin care products or exotic juices when people can go to their local store and get comparable items for a lot less money. The only way these MLM companies thrive is by requiring each distributor to purchase a quota of product per month.

Pillar #4 is a compensation plan that rewards part-timers. I don’t know enough about Vitamark’s compensation plan to evaluate it. From my years in network marketing I have found that there are very few compensation plans that reward part-timers. Most plans require people to recruit a downline of 1,000 people or more before they make any real money. This is not easy to do part-time. The best compensation plans I have seen recently are of a matrix type where people get paid if they reach the top of a matrix. This requires fewer recruits to have a good pay day. With any other compensation plan, the best chance for part-timers to make money is to find a company where they can move a certain amount of retail product each month.

Pillar #5 is to have a proven system of duplication. This last pillar is how Michael Dlouhy captures the true devotion of his followers. The truth is that only about 2% of the population have the sales skills to build a huge downline. The rest of the people who start a network marketing business never succeed. This is one of the biggest reasons that network marketing gets such a bad reputation which makes it difficult to recruit people. Michael Dlouhy allows his followers to bring others onto his weekly phone calls so he can do the recruiting for them. He has them ask everyone they meet if it would be okay if they share the ebook Success in 10 Steps. They all believe that sharing this book will make others want to go into business with them. The problem is that people join people they view as leaders, not someone who shares a book with them. If they can get people to the phone call and the prospect connects with Michael Dlouhy, they have a shot at recruiting them since Michael Dlouhy provides that leadership. The problem is that without Michael Dlouhy’s skills, duplication is difficult.

The truth is that there are no guarantees. When evaluating a network marketing company to join consider the product or service offered and if you can give 100% effort in promoting it. Look at the compensation plan and see what it will take for you to make the amount of profit you desire. Can you do it? What seems great at first glance will many times become much harder work when actually put into practice. Look at the people involved with the company both at the top and in the ranks. Do you feel comfortable around them? Do they share your values? Do you want to associate with these people to build your business even if something should happen to the company? Remember that your relationships with other people ultimately will be more valuable then any particular opportunity. If you build a great team, you can take it to any company.

Using Video to Build Your Internet Presence

I have been using video to promote this blog. Now I am using it on the blog to demonstrate how I use it. I make teaser videos which tell people to go to my blog to learn more information about different topics. I then promote them on 22 video sites, 10 podcast sites, 5 bookmarking sites, and 3 status sites. I also post it on the wall of my Facebook page.

Sending my video to all of these sites would be quite a task if I had to find each site, sign up with each of them and manually submit to each site. Luckily, I have found a program called Traffic Geyser which does it all for me. All I do is upload my video to their site, choose which sites I want to send the video to, what website I want to draw traffic to and when I want to send out the video. It prompts me for the name of the video and the description, tags and the category of the video. It gives me the likelihood of acceptance with each site. Some sites require that I choose a special category. Then with one click of the mouse, it submits to all of these sites.

This tool has expedited my ability to promote my videos to get more traffic to my site. Traffic Geyser has videos and a user guide which explains how to use their program. They also have software that creates unique capture pages for your promotion. Another nice feature with Traffic Geyser is the ability to upload a video from YouTube and the feature changes the video to get rid of the YouTube watermark and the link to similar videos at the back of your video that are displayed on YouTube. Now you can store your video on YouTube but display it on the website for your business without having it jump to your competitors’ links at the end of your video.

Because so many people are using video cameras to promote themselves on YouTube, people have gotten used to seeing videos which do not have professional lighting and are not of the best quality. Even though I have a decade of experience in the film industry, I do not concern myself with getting professional lighting for my videos. I feel that it is more important just to get the information out to the world.

I videotape myself on mini-DV tape using an inexpensive Sony Handycam. You can even use a webcam but I prefer to use the video camera. I place it on a tripod and face the LCD panel toward me so I can adjust the lighting and my placement in the frame. I turn on the camera and shoot the video of my promotion. I have a DV connection to connect my video camera to my computer. I import the video into Windows Movie Maker. I create a subtitle at the beginning of my promo with the title of the blog post I am promoting. I create a title at the end of the video with my website address. I also do a voice over on the end title spelling out my web address. I do this because many of the podcast feeds are audio only and they can’t see the titles.

Google likes videos so my videos show up on the first page for specific keywords as often as my articles and blog posts. This is a triple whammy.

You can get Traffic Geyser by clicking here.

Writing Articles to Grow Your Business

MLM Lead System Pro, an online training and recruiting system for network marketers held a contest in the fall of 2009 for the most recruits into their system. The winner of the top prize, a 2 year lease on a BMW 335i Coupe, was David Wood, a broke homeless guy living in his van in Alaska.

How did he manage that? He built his business in 4 months by writing articles, submitting them to directories and linking them back to his website. He beat out all the other top producers who were spending lots of money using pay per click marketing. The more articles he wrote, the more often one or more of his articles appeared on the first page of Google for a given keyword bringing more people to his website.

Daegan Smith, a millionaire internet marketer who is an expert on pay per click marketing, also believes that he has received most of his business because he is a prolific article writer.

By establishing yourself as an expert in your niche through article writing you accomplish two things. You get backlinks to your business website and because you have established yourself as an expert, you get credibility and people like to buy from people they believe are experts in their field.

The top article directories for getting ranked high on Google are Ezine Articles and Buzzle. Buzzle requires your article to be unique to their site. Ezine Articles does not require it. Other top article directories are WebProNews, GoArticles.com and ArticlesFactory.com. Like Buzzle, WebProNews requires that articles submitted to them be unique. When you write for any of these sites, you get a high Google ranking for the article itself. When you submit to many article directories, you create many backlinks to your main site and that gives your main website a higher Google ranking. GoArticles.com gives you an option to pay to be a featured article on their website for your category. It is expensive and I feel that more people will find your article from a Google search than from going directly to their website so I would not recommend spending the money.

Understand that you are submitting your articles for free to these sites and other people can use your articles on their websites as well. Any time they do, it is free advertising for you.

David Wood got his success from using a program called Automatic Article Submitter to submit his articles to over 100 article directories at the same time. I tried Automatic Article Submitter and was very happy with the results. It takes awhile at first to learn how to use the system but once you get everything set up, submitting articles is very simple. Initially you need to set up logins for each article directory. Automatic Article Submitter has an automated system to set up accounts at each directory and to confirm each account automatically. You can set up the submissions to go to specific directories for specific article topics. You can set up more than one account if you write articles on different topics and don’t want to put them all under the same account. They also allow you to do word spinning on your articles so that each time you submit to a directory, the composition of your article is a little bit different.

I have used Automatic Article Submitter for about a month now and have had my articles appear on the first page of Google for the specific keywords that I am tagging. I am very please with the program and recommend it for those of you who want to write articles. To get Automatic Article Submitter, click here.

Marketing Your Network Marketing Business on Facebook

Facebook is a great place to find recruits for your network marketing business. You can easily find qualified leads because people put information in their profile which lets you know that they are a potential recruit for your business. I built a list of friends of over 1000 people in one month on Facebook. Almost every one of them is a network marketer. You might be asking why I would choose network marketers since they already have a business. The reason is that the hardest task I have found in traditional recruiting is convincing people that network marketing is an acceptable business that they can do. I don’t have to convince other network marketers. They already get it.

Just like in your normal social life, you need to build relationships online with your Facebook friends. People will join a business with a person that they trust and feel that they want to work with. Network marketing is a team business so it is important to find people who want to work together on a team. Therefore, when you make friends with someone on Facebook, do not start your message by trying to sell them on your business. It is possible by doing that you will get a few recruits here and there but in the long run you will lose many more possible recruits because you turned them off by trying to make the sale too soon. Remember if you follow my procedure of adding network marketers as friends, they already have a business. They are not going to join your business unless they can see an advantage that your business has over what they are already doing.

Facebook has several ways of communicating with your friends. You can write on the wall and say a few words about your business opportunity or a webinar that explains the business opportunity. You can also use the wall to make general comments about life, business, or anything that is on your mind. Writing on the wall gets your face out there so people will recognize you when you have something to offer. You can comment on other people’s wall posts and write on their wall. If you write on the wall of someone who has a lot of friends, many people will see your post. (The maximum number of friends that Facebook allows is 5,000.) You can post information on a group site to members in the group or on a page site for fans of that page.

You can write messages to individual friends. This is a great way to get to know your friends. Instead of trying to sell them on your business, get to know them as people. Find out what is important to them in life. Remember that Facebook is a social media site. It is about making friends and network marketing is built on bringing friends together to make money together.

Facebook also has a chat feature so you can talk instantly with any of your friends who are online. This is a great way to get to know someone. Even when I am very busy I will take the time to chat with someone who wants to chat with me.

Facebook restricts the number of people you can send a message to at the same time to 20 people. Therefore, if you want to get a message out to a lot of people, you need to start a group. Then you can send messages out to up to 5,000 people at a time to members of your group.

You can also create a page for your business and invite your friends to follow it and you can link your blog to your Facebook profile using NetworkedBlogs.

After you get to know your friends and let them get to know you, you will be in a much better position to promote your network marketing business.

To know how I built my friends list to more than 1,000 in one month, see my other blog post.

Get 1000 Free Well-Qualified Leads in One Month Using Facebook

Imagine if you had access to more than just the name, phone number, email address and time zone of your leads, you know, the ones you paid for. Imagine that you knew where they worked, what their hobbies and interests are, who and what are important to them, both family and friends and in the wider cultural scene. Imagine if you could already select only those people who were already predisposed to be interested in your product or service. Imagine also that you got all of this information for free!

Wow! That is the beauty of Facebook. The account is free and there is no reason not to open one if you have something to promote.

Before you go after leads or as Facebook calls them “friends”, you need to set up your own profile page. This is extremely important because this is how you brand yourself to people you are going to choose as friends. Upload a nice picture of yourself showing a close up of your smiling face. Do not upload a picture of your dog, cat, baby, your product, your favorite sunset, your favorite cocktail or a picture of you in a large scene where we can’t see your face. Don’t upload a group shot because we don’t want to have to try to figure out which person is you. This seems like common sense but from all of the crazy profile pictures I have seen, the sense isn’t particularly common. The main reason I suggest a close up of your face is because every time you post on the wall, send a message or chat, a small icon of your profile picture appears. If you have a close up of your face, you are still recognizable. If you have any of the other pictures I mentioned, you will not make as big of an impression on others because it will be harder to recognize you.

Next, fill in the boxes on the profile sharing with others what you would like them to know about you. Show some uniqueness, what your passions are. Give your potential friends a reason to want to connect with you. You can include such things as your favorite sports, hobbies, television shows or movies if you wish. You can state your religion or politics. I would only include details about your religion and politics if you feel strongly about them and want to connect with others based on them. If not, I would leave them off. Add a few photos of yourself if you feel that they help to show others who you are. For instance, if you have photos of yourself with leaders in your industry, this can be helpful. I have a lot of travel photos because I am in the travel business and I want others to see the beauty and joy of visiting other places.

The leads that I personally focus on are all network marketers. Because of that, I include the websites to my lead generating system, my blog and my primary network marketing business. Make sure to add a paragraph about what you offer other people who will become your friends. I write that I am an Online Business & Marketing Coach. I teach businesses to dominate the search engines and to structure their web presence for massive profitability.

You must decide who you want to see your profile using the Facebook privacy settings. I choose “everyone” because I have only put things on my profile page that I wish to share with the world. My philosophy is that it will be easier for people to become friends with me if they can see something about me first. Keep in mind that all of the Facebook friends that you are going to make will start out as strangers. The easier you can make it for them to want to be your friend, the better.

Once you have set up your profile page, it is time to find some friends. Since I want to be friends with network marketers, I look at Facebook groups and pages for network marketers. A simple way to get started is to search MLM in the search box in the upper right hand corner of the Facebook page. Many groups will pop up with MLM in the name. Find groups that you like and join them. All you have to do to join is click on the group and click on the button “Join Group”. You can do the same for Facebook pages. It is not necessary to join a group in order to contact members, but I like to join so I can have easy access to the group later since the groups you join appear under your profile information.

To start with, pick a group whose members have a high likelihood of being interested in what you have to offer. In the lower left hand corner of the group page, there is a box that says “Members”. Inside the box is a link that says “See All”. Click on that link and all of the members will pop up in another screen. Next to each person’s picture icon is a button that says “Add Friend”. You can add friends that way. However, I prefer to right click on the photo and open a new tab. This way I look at the person’s profile to determine if I want to be friends with this person. This is very important and is why I have so many specially qualified friends.

I want to see that the person is serious about building a network marketing business. I look to see if they have a website to a business they are promoting, what groups and fan pages they belong to, and if I can detect a general positive attitude. I also look to see how many friends they have. When I started building a friend list, I chose only those people who had at least 100 friends. Now I will add a friend who has fewer friends if I can see that they are serious about building a business.

I will not add anyone who has the privacy settings so secure that I can’t see anything about them. I will not add anyone whose main fan pages are Mafia Wars or Farmville because these people are more interested in playing games than building a business and their constant posts will become annoying. I click on the person’s website if I am not familiar with it. Once I got a surprise when a potential friend had a pornography website. I am glad that I clicked on that link and didn’t add her as a friend.

When I click on the “Add as friend” button, there is a link that says “Add a personal message”. I click that and add the person’s first name, I would like to network with other network marketers on Facebook and sign my name. This way the person knows why I want to be friends and will not wonder why a stranger is asking for friendship. This procedure works really well.

Facebook does not like spam, so you can only do up to about 50 friend requests a day. That is why it takes a month to build your list of 1,000. As you are building your list, you will discover who the movers and shakers are in your industry and you can befriend them as well and learn a lot from them. They will have groups and fan pages and you will want to join. You will find that as you go about this process, other people will want to be friends with you. Check them out just as I mentioned above to determine if they are people who fit in with your goals.

Adding friends this way is time consuming but it is the best way to get a quality list. To see my Facebook profile, click here.

In my next post I will tell you how to market to your friends.

Free Internet Marketing Using Social Media

When you are starting out in business, chances are that you have a limited advertising budget. You don’t want to blow it on advertising campaigns that don’t bring results. One of the simplest and also free ways of advertising is to join social networks and use other social media. There are many out there and each has its own benefits. My suggestion is to pick one, master it and then add another one. In this blog I will briefly describe the experience with each social network. Later, I will go into detail on each one.

Facebook

Facebook is an easy social network to use. It is easy to fill in information about yourself and your business. You can easily upload photos and videos. You can connect with customers for your business or prospects for an MLM opportunity by adding them as Friends. You can form your own group and invite friends to join. You can also start a fan page for your business. You can create lists of friends and send information out to 20 people at a time. With a group or fan page, you can send to everyone who subscribes. This can be in the thousands of people. You can also talk to friends in real time using the online chat feature.

MySpace

MySpace allows you freedom to personalize your profile page putting anything on there that describes you and your business. You can add videos and music and create an individual look to the page. MySpace allows you to search for customers or prospects based on demographics. You can connect with other people like Facebook. You can also create or join groups based on specific topics. It was originally created for very young people and still has that bias. Many people create pages that take minutes to load even using a high speed internet connection which can turn off all but the most patient of individuals.

Twitter

Twitter allows you to communicate with your customers in real time. It is a great way to get a buzz going about your business in conversations of 140 characters or less. Each message is called a tweet. People can sign up to follow you on Twitter to read everything you have to say. It is a great way to communicate to your customers using your mobile phone.

YouTube

With the advent of YouTube, anyone can be a star or at least can make a video statement about anything. You can promote your business on YouTube and send your YouTube video out to many other video sites and RSS feeds. It is free to subscribe to YouTube. You create your own channel and people can subscribe to your channel. You can also create your own YouTube group.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a professional network and is good if your business requires you to connect with other professionals or businesspeople. You submit your profile listing your business, your experience and skills. You can then connect with other businesspeople by joining company groups and user groups and personal connections.

Digg

Digg allows you to share with others something that you like. You can use Digg in two ways, to comment on other people’s articles, blogs, videos, or images or submit your own and have other Digg members comment on it. The most popular items jump to the home page of their category. This is a great way to get the word out about your business if it the item you submit becomes really popular.

There are other social media sites but the ones I have mentioned are the most popular and I would suggest you pick one of them to start. When you have mastered all of them you can look at StumbleUpon, Reddit, Yelp, Delicious, Yahoo Buzz, Badoo, Bebo, and PeopleString.

Search Engine Optimization

Once you have your website uploaded to your webhost, you will want to submit it to the major search engines Google, Yahoo, and Bing. To make sure that you maximize your exposure on these search engines, there are certain things that you need to keep in mind for search engine optimization (SEO).

When building a website, there are certain “metatags” that are created that the search engines see but are not necessarily apparent to the visitor to the site. The first thing is the title of the webpage. Make sure that your title describes the webpage. For example, the title of this blog is “Guide to Building a Strong Profitable Internet Business”. The title appears in the top of your browser. It appears as the description on the page at the bottom of your computer screen. If you have more than one web page open, it appears as the description of the webpage so a person can easily go between web pages based on the title. It also appears as the title of the webpage when you bookmark it. For that reason, do not put “Home Page” as your title. This is something that I see all the time. You know it’s your home page but other people need to know what it is a home page to.

Limit your title to 60 characters since some search engines will cut off the title at 60 characters.

The other things that a search engine robot looks for on your web page are the web page description and the keywords. The keywords determine which web pages will come up when people search in the search engine. The description will be shown under your website title so people can skim through the list of websites and determine which one most closely fits what they are searching for. Google offers a keyword tool to help you pick the best keywords for your site. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

To submit your website to Google, go to http://www.google.com/addurl/
To submit your website to Yahoo, go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
To submit your website to Bing, go to http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx
To submit your website to AOL, go to http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

There are several sites that will submit your website to many search engines for free. One of them, AddMe will submit your site to 22 search engines including Google. FastSubmit at will submit your site to 89 search engines around the world for free. SubmitExpress will submit to 37 search engines. Other search engine submitters are FreeSubmissionWeb, ineedhits, Submitshop, Searchengineoptimizing, AddPro, Pageranklist, Freewebsubmission, Amfibi, Burf, Jerkasmarknad, LocalSubmit, SrSubmit. You may want to check several submitters since they seem to submit to different search engines.

There are many firms that will optimize your website for search engines for a fee. This may ultimately be the best solution for your business. Before you pay someone to optimize your site, look at Google’s own search engine optimization information at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/