Internet Marketing Versus MLM – Crucial Facts & Knowledge

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I’ll admit that this is kind of a sore subject for me becauseI really dislike MLM and network marketing.

It’s easy to compare internet marketing and MLM, because they are actually very different things, though sometimes language is used in such a way that makes them seem like they are actually the same.

This is mostly because MLM scammers do not know the difference.

MLM stands for Multi-Level-Marketing

Basically, it is a pyramid scheme that has found a loophole. Hopefully you have heard the term ‘pyramid scheme’, though you may be a bit unclear about what it actually is.

Pyramid schemes are illegal in many countries. They basic idea is that when you sign up, you pay a fee to be ‘in the group’ or ‘part of the business’. You are then responsible for getting people into your ‘down line’, i.e. the people that pay you to enter the group.

Of the fee they pay you, a percentage goes to your ‘up line’, the people who signed you up, and a percentage goes to you. Then when people in your down line sign OTHER people up, you make a percentage of whatever fees they get paid.

The more people in your downline, the more you get paid. The more people your down line signs up, the more you get paid.

The problem is that this is just exchanging money. There is no product, and no value. The last person in the ‘scheme’ is unable to make money because there is no one to pay them, and the first people that are on top of the ‘pyramid’ (probably the owners of the business) are multi-millionaires.

Multi-level marketing is THE SAME THING, except they found a loophole. By providing products along with the exchange of money, they can say that they are actually selling something.

Still, the concept works the same. I sell you some crap and an opportunity to get people into your ‘group’. Whoever pays you for the crappy products, both I and you make a percentage, all the meanwhile, the big-heads on top are becoming millionaires!

Plus, no one really wants the crap that MLM people are selling, which may be Tupperware, magazine subscriptions, or access to MLM training videos.
I’ll talk more about multi-level marketing in this video below, but lets move onto internet marketing, which is something completely different.

The Facts About Internet Marketing

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Internet marketing is a broad concept that simply refers to marketing things on the internet. Many real businesses use internet marketing through Google Adwords, search engine marketing, or YouTube. There are tons of ways to leverage the internet to market real businesses, real services, and real products.

I mentioned earlier that MLM scammers like to now call what they do “internet marketing”. In some ways, they are right; they have figured out how to use the internet to extend the reach of their scams. In some sense of the work , it is in fact, ‘internet marketing’.

The trouble is that many people, including myself, refer to the work we do online as internet marketing. In fact, I call myself an internet marketer. This is because I have several websites and do marketing for several different businesses. I do not work for just one company or promote just one product.

So “internet marketer” describes what I do.

What Will Be Your Business Reputation Online?

Furthermore, internet marketing is also closely related to ‘affiliate marketing’, which is a more specific term that refers to affiliating yourself (or website) with certain products and companies. This is what I teach in my 5 Day Getting Started Course and what I learned in the business community called Wealthy Affiliate.

In pains me to think that some people may mistake what I do as the scummy work that MLMers do. And I feel even worse when I realize that many people who are new to making money online may be tricked, or led astray by false promises of riches.

I will no doubt write more on this subject in the future because I hope to clarify the difference between building a legitimate, sustainable business on the internet and just getting a group of your friends to sell a bunch of useless rubbish to try and make a few dirty dollars.

http://onemorecupof-coffee.com/internet-marketing-versus-mlm-crucial-facts-knowledge/

So how much money do bloggers actually make?

Lifestyle blogs have existed in some shape or form for more than a decade. In the early 2000s, many started as ways for young women to keep in touch with family living far away—a virtual diary of their exploits in a new city. Most never intended to make money from them. Their sites were rudimentary, hosted on early blogging platforms like Live Journal or Blogger, with low-quality photos.

But with the rise of more sophisticated software and social media platforms, blogging has morphed into an online equivalent of Conde Nast magazines. The most prominent bloggers present highly polished personas across multiple online channels and publishprofessional-quality photographs. As their reach grows, they're increasingly referred to as “tastemakers” or “influencers.”

They've also started creating new revenue streams, such as affiliate links. (These are links to e-commerce sites that sell whatever leather jacket, stiletto bootie or crossbody bag the blogger is sporting in that day's blog photo. Whenever someone clicks through and buys the item, the blogger receives a commission.) Other opportunities for revenue come from “brand ambassadorships” that generally involve multiple posts about a company or even helping to create new products for a well-established brand and taking a cut of the sales.

Related:
• Turning a blog into a business

Most Chicago bloggers don't have the reach of the top fashion and lifestyle bloggers on the coasts, whose ubiquity and social media followings lend them near-celebrity status.

In Los Angeles, Chiara Ferragni, a 27-year-old who pens fashion blog TheBlondeSalad.com, boasts 3.4 million Instagram followers. (Vogue magazine, by comparison, has about 3.6 million.) She commands $30,000 to $50,000 to host an event, will rake in an estimated $9 million this year thanks to product collaborations with brands such as Steve Madden—and recently earned the distinction of becoming the first lifestyle blogger to receive her ownHarvard Business School case study.

In general, someone must have tens of thousands of social media followers to command rates that would allow her to blog full time, according to several local bloggers.

Most, from fledgling to well-established sites, create media kits similar to those circulated by mainstream publications that describe their editorial tone and audience reach in order to connect with brands. A fairly new blogger with perhaps 5,000 unique monthly visitors might charge $100 for a post sponsored by a company. He also might offer to bundle content and create several posts (and complementary Instagrams and tweets) for about $1,000.

FOLLOWERS AS FRIENDS

But most bloggers, many of whom slowly built their following through years of personal writing, consider their followers to be almost friends. They're wary of publishing too much sponsored content. Many strive for a 1-to-1 ratio of sponsored to unsponsored posts, meaning they only earn money on half of their output at best.

Affiliate link programs like RewardStyle have received a lot of attention for helping to monetize blogging. But many bloggers say it's hard to make much money that way because, while readers might click through to see what jacket a fashion blogger is wearing, they rarely complete the purchase. The payment threshold for most affiliate link programs is $100 a month; if a blogger earns less than that in commission, she receives no income. But if a blogger has a large following and dozens of people purchase a dress or pair of shoes she posts about, she stands to take as much as a 20 percent slice of each sale.

Bloggers can more reliably earn money through hosting advertising on their site and agreeing to host an event on behalf of a brand, though those payments also vary widely.

"We're not raking in cash,” says Graham Kostic, a former Modern Luxury art director. He says he can run beauty and fashion blog GlossedAndFound.com full time only because of his husband's salary. “With blogging, it's not the same advertising model. It's really hard to tell what's going on behind the scenes and to know what the industry standards are."

http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20150314/NEWS07/150319897/so-how-much-money-do-bloggers-actually-make

Dale Partige's October 2014 Income Report

 Welcome to This Month’s Income Report.

Last month I made $31,271.12 working from home. I believe transparency frees. Because of this, I have decided to provide my readers with a detailed monthly report of how I’ve turned my dream into a profitable reality.

But remember, this was not easy. I have put in thousands of hours to make this work. My goal is to offer you a few shortcuts, help you see your blind spots, and hopefully get you building your very own profitable company, blog, or product.

Below, you’ll see I share everything from how I make money and where it comes from, to my monthly expenses and even my learnings.

A Little History
The previous 10 years of my life have been spent creating large companies with several employees and millions in revenue.

“But I didn’t own my companies, my companies owned me.”

Over the past year, I’ve shifted my philosophy to creating a lifestyle business around five non-negotiables so I could spend more time with my family.

My 5 Non-Negotiables:

1. My work must have purpose.
2. My work must offer me freedom.
3. My work must have strong revenue potential.
4. My work must require few employees.
5. My work must allow me to be geographically independent.

A point of clarity: This report does not include any earnings I make from my traditional companies, like Sevenly or my rock climbing gym . I am not currently drawing a salary from these companies so my earnings are typically spread apart and in larger chunks. This report also does not include income from my upcoming book People over Profit to be released in May 2015.

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Important Happenings From October

Launching a New Business is Difficult
I haven’t launched a new business in a few years, and to be honest, it’s hard. StartupCamp.com will be the first time I’ve started a company as a father and full-time blogger. I’m finding myself working at night after everyone is asleep (which I don’t like) just to finish out my daily task lists.

What am I’m learning from all this? Life cannot and should not be like this for long. I must define a finish line for this season to end and return to my normal schedule. The question is, when?

If you have a business idea but don’t know where to begin, signup for to be notified for StartupCamp here.

Online Events Are Highly Lucrative
Blogcamp was an experiment. A two hour online webcast to help people learn how to start a profitable blog people will read. I had never hosted an online event before and was unsure if the idea was capable of producing strong revenue.

My Strategy: I put up a simple splash page explaining the event and offered three price points: $79, $99, and $149 all with varying perks. 64% of people ended up purchasing the $149 package. But we didn’t allow people to just buy tickets on the spot. Every attendee had to apply by filling out a form explaining why they should be accepted, their potential blog topics, where they lived, etc. As planned, this tactic of scarcity (limiting the ability to get in) not only drove the level of intrigue through the roof, but refined the quality of users who actually attended the event.

Once attendees were accepted we placed them into a sequence of 12 strategic emails educating and urging them to purchase a ticket. This is where I learned the most. Email automation is a really powerful marketing tool. This series of emails converted at 56% and in just 60 days we had over 275 paid attendees at $32,112.00 in revenue. Wow!

The event was a huge success and we plan on both reselling this event’s content and hosting a new event in the near future.

I’m Finally Done Speaking for 2014I hopped on 46 airplanes this year. And while I love the act of speaking, I am not loving the travel as much anymore. This month, I was lucky enough to have my last two events for the year here in Oregon at the Bend WebCam Conference and the Socality Summit in Portland (seen below). Next year, I have limited the number of speaking engagements to 10 in hopes to focus more on family and StartupCamp.

Family Photos Are More Important Than I Thought
We did our first family photo shoot and I learned a few things. First, there are few things that are a better investment then family photos. Second, family photos should be completed every single year. With kids growing so fast and even us adults changing quickly (gray hair :), adding this to your family’s annual plan is smart. Here are four of my favorites from our session.

Still Expecting Low Revenue for November & DecemberAs I stated in my last month’s income report, I will be expecting lower revenue for October, November, and December. I have decided to cut way back on consulting and launching new products to focus on StartupCamp.com. This will likely take my regular $40-50k per month income down to $20-25k per month. If everything goes as planned, I expect income to rise back up in January and February.

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 October’s Business Learnings

Learning #1 – The Money is In Making Your Product A Part of People’s Daily Routine:A mentor once told me if I could make my product, service, or content become a part of people’s daily life, the revenue would follow. At the time, I was thinking toothpaste or gmail, but then I launched “The Daily Positive” and I’m beginning to understand what he meant. Additionally, a friend launched a company called TheSkimm. A daily email (M-F) which curates the day’s most important world happenings. They now have millions of people opening their emails every morning. Do they make money? Not much… yet.

Critical Question: How can you make your product, service, or content a part of people’s daily routine?

Learning #2 – Leverage Your Archive For Platform Growth & Revenue: I have written over 200 articles on The Daily Positive. A mix of content for building a great life and business. I try to release a new article 2-3 times per week. But what about past articles? What about the great pieces of content from last year? A few weeks ago, I started usingMeetEdgar.com to reshare my archive of past content. Now, you will see my old (but good) articles again on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.

What has this done for my traffic? 42% increase in just 4 weeks. This means more email captures, more followers on Facebook and Twitter, more ad revenue, and no extra work. Sounds like a good strategy.

Critical Question: Do you have old content that is just sitting there? How can you build a schedule to reshare past content on a regular basis?

Learning #3 Starting Points Drive Quick ConnectionWhen people land on your site, do they know where to begin? For me, this is where I have failed. I’m learning that getting people into my funnel requires a clear starting point. Maybe it’s a page with a title at the top “Create The Life And Business You Want With These 4 Steps”…

Step #1: Signup for The Daily Positive email
Step#2: Download my free e-book on creating the life you want
Step #3: Follow these people, blogs, and thought leaders (including my social media accounts)
Challenge: Offer them something physical to make the first step into what you’re promoting.

This is a far better strategy than just sending people to an article or your about page. It’s on my list of things to create in the coming months.

Critical Question: Where is the first step in your customer funnel? Have you clearly defined it? If not, how can you and what will it consist of?

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This Month’s Cool Tools, Articles, & Books

Article: 14 Social Media Marketing Tools Recommended by The Pro’s:This was the best tool tip article I’ve read all year. If you’re a marketer and blogger, you can thank me later.

Tool: Quill Engage: Over the past few years, I have dabbled in Google Analytics. Like most people, I understand the basics but I’ve never been able to really leverage the data to make informed decisions on how to grow my traffic. Quill Engage is a free app you hook up to your analytics account that provides you with an incredible layman’s term report on your trends, shifts, and points of interest. A must for any blogger or web based business.

Book: Essentialism: Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin? Do you simultaneously feel overworked and underutilized? Are you often busy but not productive? This book will help you define what’s really essential to a successful life. Get it here.

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My Earnings in October:

Red = Lower Than Previous Month
Green = Higher Than Previous Month
Black = Stayed the Same as Previous Month————————————Google Adsense: $2,880.02Beacon Ads: $758.80Bluehost Affiliate (my personal recommendation for web hosting): $7,280.00Amazon Affiliate: $253.30Shareasale Affiliate: $99.00
Premium Blog Posts: $0.00Corporate Business Consulting: $9,500.00One-on-One Skype Consulting: $3,494.00Paid Social Media Advertising: $4,820.00
Speaking Engagements & Webinars: $2,686.00
–Total Gross Revenue: $31,271.12

My Monthly Expenses:

Server Costs: $152.00
Chartbeat (Website Analytics): 9.99
Dropbox: $9.99
Aweber (Email Marketing Subscription): $704.00
Social Media Automation (Hootsuite): $14.99
Viral Tag (Pinterest Automation): $4.99
Freshbooks (Accounting Software): $29.95
PO BOX: $24.00
ShoeBoxed (Receipt App): $9.99
Store (Shopify): $14.99
Google Apps: $45.00
Independent Contractors: $4,440.00Speaking Agent: $1,554.85
Travel: $308.00
–Total Expenses: $7,322.74-Total Net Profit: $23,938.38

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How Many Hours I Worked Per Week

As I stated above, stewarding my time is not only critical, it’s a struggle. Making great income is nothing if it took you 60+ hours per week to do it. True financial success is making more income with less time. This month… I didn’t do so well.

Don’t get too busy making a living, you forget to make a life.

October Week 1 = 37 hours
October Week 2 = 35 hours
October Week 3 = 41 hours
October Week 4 = 29 hours
Total Hours Worked: 142

My October Website Traffic Report:

Total Visitors: 685,012
Total Page Views: 978,289
Most Popular Life Post: 4 Signs of A True Gentleman
Most Popular Business Post: 4 Types Of People Who Never Succeed In Business

My October Social Media Growth:

Facebook Fans:  30,397 +2,395 new fans this month
Twitter Followers:  143,774 +7,551 new followers this month
Instagram Followers:  18,469 +968 new followers this month
Tumblr Followers: 242,337 +304 new followers this month
Pinterest Followers: 735,320 +8,006 new followers this month
TDP Life Category Email Subscribers: 65,536 +2,139 subscribers this month
TDP Business Category Email Subscribers: 13,064 +2,984 subscribers this month

http://dalepartridge.com/october-2014-income-report/

Making Money Online With Great Backlinks

Making money online – including professionals looking for more qualified traffic coming to their web sites, involves a variety of techniques including quality backlinks.

How do you do that using web 2.0 backlinks – ie links from social media sites?

A recent site focused on online success has written about the use of RSS feeds to generate great traffic to websites.

RSS (Rich Site Summary) is the best key for web 2.0 link building easily. Because its one of the best tools for creates connections easily between your affiliate site and all other web 2.0 sites. Ultimately it helps you to create strong networks to drive traffic to your site

What is RSS Feed?

Don’t know what actually RSS is? Don’t worry! RSS is type of a language, that format for supply regular changes of website content to subscribed person. RSS is very much important for regular content updating websites like: News-related sites, affiliate related sites etc.

Why need RSS? Benefits of RSS:

If you want to notify your regular visitors about new content of your website then you need RSS helps. Because when you have uploaded a new content or updated anything into your website RSS stay updated your visitors about your website to send an email into their inbox, and sent an update into their websites. So they can visit your website by updated links. When we visit any website or blog we see that an orange color block like this is a RSS icon, when somebody subscribed by giving their email, they will notify as soon as you updated your web content.

Usefulness of RSS Feed:

Most of the web 2.0 sites allow users to create RSS feed, and adding content to their networks using RSS. At first they translate any RSS feeds into a standard HTML format, that’s why the RSS can be published to any websites as helpful content. Must try to post your new articles to an RSS enabled sites, so it will automatically update your RSS feed, and also update the site using the same feeds. So you just need to update one site but other sites will be updated automatically by RSS.

Not only the rss feed you get from the web 2.0 sites, but also get a backlink for your site as the original source of RSS feed. That means, you can build a chain of backlinks of your site from huge and highly popular web 2.0 sites. So the more backlinks you have from web 2.0 sites the more traffic you get from various platfrom.

How to practice web 2.0 link building in a systematic way:
1.We know that content is king, like web 2.0 sites are popular for their quality and unique content, so you should write quality, unique, and useful 4-5 contents with minimum 400+ words, and the article must be keyword optimized or keyword friendly, means you have to put your main keywords into your articles for several times. Must make sure that your articles have lucrative and attractive title containing your main keyword, and the title must be from 50-60 characters. Also make sure to put your main keywords into your article body once or twice in the starting and closing of a paragraph.

2.Now you are going to spread up your quality content to many web 2.0 sites by linking your main site. So first start with squidoo lens, squidoo lens is one of the best web 2.0 sites, so creates a high quality lens on squidoo and post one of your best articles there with linking back to your main website link and must create an anchor text regarding your main keyword you would like to rank for.

3.Now create a twitter account and increase your followers by searching who has the same interest you have and tell them you have created a lens on squidoo site by posting you lens link. This will help you to create a link wheel to spread up your site links.

4.Hubpages is one of the best web 2.0 sites like squidoo lens. So you should create a hubpages page with your another unique and quality content by putting your main keywords into the article title and body content and also make sure to anchor text with main keywords of your affiliate niche or website niche to drive huge traffic to your sites easily. Hubpages provides more monetization tools for monetize your site more easily than squidoo. Then you must add your RSS feed URL from your squidoo lens to your hub pages.

5.Same go back to your twitter account again and post a twit about your hub pages.

6.Now create a blog site using free blogger.com, just create a Google account and go to blogger.com and post your 3rd article into blogger but must make a link back to your site regarding your best keyword from blogger to your main site. Finally add the RSS feed url of your squidoo, and hubpages to your blog site.

7.Again go to twitter and do the same task like to post a twit about your blogger post.

8.Now make another page at tumblr.com and post your 4th article to tumblr.com and add your RSS feed url of blogger page, squidoo lens page, hubpages page to your tumblr page.

9.Then create another post on twitter about your tumblr page.

10.Now start sharing all of your pages to your twitter, facebook, facebook groups, pinterest, stumbleupon, and all other social media sites account to spread up your content everywhere.

Lastly do pinging from pingler.com; it will help you to notify Google about your pages to index firstly to your pages on Google’s server and show in Google search result.

http://www.lawfuel.com/making-money-online-great-backlinks

How soggy french fries help Twitter make money

DUBLIN, Ireland -- Four years ago, Twitter started making money the way many Internet companies with free services do, by selling advertising. Now it's got a new revenue stream: soggy french fries.

Advertising remains at the center of the social network's business, based on people sharing terse, 140-character messages. But Adam Bain, Twitter's president of global revenue, described two new businesses launched this year in a talk here at the Web Summit tech conference. One of them is e-commerce, and the other is selling access to Twitter's data to companies that think that data will help them with their own business.

That second category is where the soggy fries come in. Bain was surprised when a maker of $50,000 industrial deep-fryers wanted to license Twitter's data. It turns out that tweets about soggy fries could reveal where the company's customers weren't maintaining the fryers properly, Bain said. And not only that -- the company could show the tweets to those customers as "social proof" that there's a problem that needs to be fixed

Bain cited other examples of the business: hedge funds are guiding trading based on Twitter sentiment analysis, and health companies are seeing if they can track disease spread across borders. Twitter hopes to find more data-licensing customers through a partnership with IBM, a former Twitter patent foe, whose consultants now are able to encourage their clients to use the service.

Making money has been a big issue for Twitter, and critics have jabbed the company for taking too long to convert its popularity into money. The ad business helped, but going public one year ago only increased the scrutiny.

There's been progress, though. Twitter last month reported its second straight quarter of profit -- $7 million excluding items like stock-based compensation. And Twitter's user base grew to 284 million.

As is fashionable in tech circles these days, Twitter aspires to change the world, not merely achieve financial success.

"We think of revenue like oxygen. It's necessary for life but it's not the reason to live," Bain said, quotingTwitter Chief Executive Dick Costolo. "Amazing companies build products to change and touch the world. That's been the story line for Twitter. We hope to touch every single person on the planet, and revenue is a byproduct of it."

Even if making money is secondary, it's Bain's job. "One thing I'm most excited about is the revenue diversification," he said.

Twitter ads

The data licensing business is real, but the advertising business has been around longer.

There, Twitter offers "promoted tweets" folded into the stream of tweets that Twitter users see.

"We could have brought banners or a disruptive ad experience," but chose to use promoted tweets that fit natively in the Twitter world instead, Bain said. "Ads look, act and feel just like regular content. You can retweet it, you can favorite it. That yields amazing advantages. Consumers that retweet ads with reckless abandon are passing messages virally on behalf of those advertisers." That means more impact for advertisers, but in a method that "respects the users in a pretty important way."

Twitter deliberately set up its auction process for placement of promoted tweets to encourage a good fit with Twitter itself. Winning that auction isn't just a matter of paying more than other bidders, Bain said.

"It's also the engagement rate around the ad. There's a financial incentive for the advertiser to provide good content," Bain said. "There's an economic advantage on Twitter ads for advertisers to be good, not just to be loud."

E-commerce, too

Twitter's e-commerce revenue is the least mature of the three sources, Bain said, calling it just an "incubator" project now.

"There's a big distance between discovering a product and making a purchase," he said, referring to all the steps that separate interest in a product from looking it up online, finding a place to buy it, and closing the transaction. "We decided to shrink that distance."

E-commerce is a potentially large revenue stream, even if Twitter is only taking a small fraction of transaction prices in fees. Analyst firm Emarketer estimates that in 2014, businesses worldwide will sell consumers $1.47 trillion worth of goods and services, a 20 percent increase over 2013.

Twitter launched a "buy now" button test in June, and it's got a partnership with payment transaction processor Stripe. Now it's experimenting with pricing and the best ways to work with its users' emotions.

"With one click you can purchase a product right from the platform," Bain said. "The best thing about Twitter is that it's a live in-the-moment platform. We think there's a huge opportunity for live commerce right now."