Guru Shmuru

The following is a piece from my new blog. This stand alone page was created because this issue needs some serious attention. A lot of so called gurus are getting away with some pretty shady dealings. Time to pull back the curtain on these dirty deeds.

If you have been around the internet marketing world for any length of time, you have surely seen tons of so called ?gurus? with various programs they promote. After time, you can start to see right through these shams.

Let me elaborate with an example.

When I was first starting out, I saw a splash page on a traffic exchange with a video of a guy talking about how simple it was to start making money on the internet. He spoke of a system he had developed that would get you started making money in less than 30 minutes. It all sounded really good, and being the newbie that I was, I signed up.

The program consisted of several components. There was a link to join a well known revenue sharing social media site, an auto responder, training program, lead CO-OP, and a place where you can view your sponsor?s primary business and either join or enter another business of your choice. Each of these was intended to be a separate income stream. To make life easier for the newbie, a splash page is provided. All I had to do was post my link on several traffic exchanges and start pulling in referrals.

I did this, and the referrals started coming in. Slowly at first, but then things picked up fairly quickly. Before I knew it, I had quite a few referrals. YEA ME! Not really. What I found was, about 1 in 15 referrals would actually take the next step, after entering their email address, and actually register for anything. Of those, even fewer ever showed any activity. In short, 1 in about every 50 referrals who filled in the opt-in form would actually try to build anything.

When you are promoting something, and building your list, keep this in mind. Many who opt in are only tire kickers. If you work at building a relationship with these people, in time, they may see the value in what you are doing.

The biggest problem with this system was the total lack of support. The idea as that you would not have to do anything for your people, they could learn everything from the website. Network Marketing is a people business. To get training in this program you had to pay a fairly steep monthly subscription. Of course, you are supposed to be able to make more money off this training when the people you recruit sign up. I have a real problem with training that someone is making money simply by providing it to me. There are more agendas at work there, and credibility takes a hit when that happens.

The real kicker came later. I came across something that sounded very similar. When I investigated, I learned it was the same guy who was promoting the exact same system with a different name and different graphics. Apparently the first one had pretty well played out, so he had to develop a whole new wrapper and repackage the same old program. Since then I know of at least two other times the same person has done this. Yes, that makes 4 different versions of the exact same program floating around out there under different names.

One more thing to point out in this example is the lead CO-OP. To put it bluntly, buying leads is a scam. For one, it is not duplicatable. Many people on your team will not be able to afford it. What's worse is how these leads are generated. Typically, these so called "targeted leads" are gathered through less than reputable means. There are 2 main ways these lists are developed.

Number 1 is from MLM companies that fail. Over 90% of MLM companies never make it 4 years. When they close, the only real asset they have is their distributor list. These get sold to leads companies and now the people on the list are being bombarded by offers from people who bought that list.

The other method is more devious. What happens is, a new company will come along. They will start heavily promoting their pre-launch phase. Often times they offer a big incentive such as being able to join for free only during the pre-launch. Lots of people register and start promoting the program and it grows virally. The devious part is, the owners have no intention of actually running a company. In this instance, just before the launch date, this "company" will release some sort of statement claiming difficulties and stating the they are closing. This is if you are lucky. Many simply disappear without a trace. The owners then sell the list of everyone who registered to a company who will turn around and sell them to individuals as "targeted leads". Don't laugh, I have seen it happen.

This leads me to my final point. You see a similar phenomenon taking place frequently in the internet marketing world. Some ?guru? released his latest eBook. It?s usually free to download it, but if you want re-branding rights it will cost you a monthly subscription fee. These books are loaded full of affiliate links. Again, if someone is trying to share knowledge, but has to fill the book with affiliate links to make a buck off sharing it, what is he really trying to do? More often than not the information is not the main focus. They hope to get as many people signed up and paying for those re-branding rights as possible so that they will go out and recruit even more people to do the same thing. The problem is, these things play out really quickly. You will see them promoted all over the internet for a few weeks to a couple months, and then nothing. It dries up completely. So, what does the ?guru? do next? Well, he already has his next eBook almost ready for release. The cycle starts over and now this new book is the next ?BIGGEST THING TO HIT THE INTERNET? or however they hype it.

If you have seen this too, and are looking for something different, check out the Mentoring page. While you are there, click on the eBook download. This is a different kind of eBook. You will not find a single affiliate link in it. Only solid information on what is working in network marketing TODAY! After reading the book, you will have the opportunity to get plugged into a system, totally free, where you will have access to training calls 5 nights a week.

Now THAT is a breath of fresh air.

If you are just finding this site through this page, click over to the home page and check out our BIG mlm Tip of the Day.

See you around,
Bill


That concludes the original piece. If you would like more info on this or other topics, please visit my blog at http://billsbigmlmblog.blogspot.com/. This blog provides daily tips for growing your business as well as some tools and resources to assist you along the way.