Social media statistics are changing every day — or is it every minute? — and this whole aspect of internet marketing is exploding even faster and more furiously than predicted. So, if you’re not yet using it to some extent, it’s time to get on the bandwagon.

There is a right way and a wrong way to going about social media marketing, and I’ll get into that too. . .but for now, here are some “hot off the press” (July 2010) social media statistics.

First, let’s take look at some things that are NOT as powerful as they were even 6 months to a year ago. And by the way, I got this information from a recent (and, unfortunately no longer available) webinar that was put on by Robert Grant of Crowd Conversion and Don Crowther who is an internet marketing and social media expert.

Social bookmarking is no longer up there as a powerful site-rank raiser. And, as most of us already knew, it can actually hurt you in the rankings. This is great news for me because I’ve never been a fan of social bookmarking strategies.

Your Facebook Profile audience is not important anymore, but your Facebook Page is where all the power lies. If you haven’t yet set up your Facebook Page, go ahead and watch my video tutorial on how to do that.

MySpace is deemed unimportant, as are Digg, Delicious, and Redit (all of which are Social Bookmarking sites).

Some social media elements that are becoming more effective, on the other hand, are Hubpages, StumbleUpon, guest blogging, Twitter, and, of course, videos. If you know how to manage one or all of these right, you’re ahead of the game.

Video Social Media Statistics

1. Today, a quarter of the world’s bandwidth is in video.

2. Cisco predicts that will rise to 90% bt the year 2013.

3. Last year, video grew by 62%. By the year 2020, it will be nearly 50 times what it was in 2009.

4. The amount of video that will be broadcast over the internet in 2020 will be enough to fill 75 billion IPads. That is the digital equivalent of the entire population of the earth tweeting constantly for a century.

Facebook Social Media Statistics

1. On March 13 2010, Facebook overtook Google and became the most trafficked website in the U.S., with 400 million users who spend an average of 55 minutes per day on this site.

2. Today, 54% of all internet users are on Facebook.

3. Ryan Deiss, leading internet marketer, states “Facebook traffic converts in most cases, at least twice as well as any other form of PPC, especially Google.”

4. Starbucks, Coca Cola, Best Buy, Dell, and Vitamin Water are just some corporations who have tapped into the power of Facebook.

5. 25 % of all pages in the U.S. are on Facebook.

If you’ve been wondering where you’ll find your MLM customers and potential business owners, YouTube and Facebook are sure-fire bets. As I mentioned, there is a right and a wrong way to go about using these sites in your marketing efforts. To learn the right way, and the much easier way than what the majority of internet marketers are now practicing, sign up for my Smart MLMer course. I paid a lot of money to learn the information I share here, and I’m letting you in on it right now for free!

MLM prospects. I personally hate that term. It’s right up there with “newbie” and “guru” in my hated common MLM industry terms list. To me, “MLM prospects” conjures up the image of some sort of property or something, not the real, living, breathing, PEOPLE that they really are, who have an entrepreneurial spirit, a strong will to change their lives, and a desire to help others.

I prefer to think of “MLM prospects” as “potential team members” or “future team members”. Sure, it’s longer, but doesn’t that sound more humane? And that’s what your goal is. . .to have more team members that you can build a relationship with and a business with.

Having said that, there are some really important things that you need to know about your potential team members. If you don’t have the following facts that I share below ingrained in your mind, whatever you may be doing in terms of marketing to these individuals will not be effective. . .so pay attention.

What scares your potential team members? I mean, what REALLY scares them? What really keeps them awake at night? What is constantly on their mind, even when they are doing other things? This shouldn’t be too hard to answer. What scared you enough to start checking out “non-traditional” business models like network marketing? Did you lose your job or retirement? Did you feel that you were losing touch with your kids, and you would never be able to get this time back? Or were you (are you) most scared about investing any money in an MLM opportunity, something that up to 90% of people cannot turn into a reliable source of income.

Were you (are you) scared about wasting money that you didn’t (don’t) even have in the first place? Most are scared about what people think and terrified of “selling”, because they haven’t yet learned that effective selling in today’s world has nothing to do with the “hard sell”, but everything to do with refining yourself, so that others actually seek you out. They are afraid of failing, and being called stupid, and all of those things that you were (or still are) afraid of.

See, these “MLM prospects” are real people, just like you. Why is it so important that you realize that? First of all, it’s much easier to build relationships with real people than with some sort of score that you have to reach in order to hit your month’s goals.

In order to find your potential team members, you need to really understand how they feel, and where they are looking for solutions. Then, you need to be in that place, and you offer what they need. Relating to these real people as potenial or future team members, rather than “MLM prospects” is crucial to the growth of your business, and the development of your team members’ businesses.

In my Smart MLMer free training course, I go into great detail about 10 more facts that you absolutely need to know about your future team members in order to bring them on board with you. Ignoring or simply not being aware of these facts means wasting countless hours of time, not to mention money, on recruiting “MLM prospects” and having nothing to show for it. After you’re armed with these essential facts, I then show you step-by-step EXACTLY how to use them correctly to bring in highly qualified team members for your business. . .without you spending a dime.

How many times have you heard “I hate Google” in the last year? We all know that Google is all-powerful when it comes to marketing on the internet. They’ve turned into the ones that internet marketers love to hate. I get someone ranting about their unfair practices in my email inbox every day. And not more than a week ago, a network marketing friend of mine called to say that someone had called him the middle of the night to say that they were going to shut down his YouTube channel. And they did. Pretty freaky, huh?

The latest news is from Mike Dillard. He writes. . .It’s Official . . .Google = Morons, and you can see the rest paraphrased here. . .

Google is totally out of control. Over the past year, they’ve gone on a rampage what they term is “providing a better search experience for visitors” by canceling the accounts of their most active, (and legitimate) PPC advertisers. If you don’t know it already, this is called “the Google Slap”.

Dillard goes on to say that his sources tell him that Google has fired the 30,000 outsourcers who make up their compliance department because they’ve pretty much kicked EVERYONE off.

Now here’s the biggie. . .

Mike Dillard has a Google Rep for his Adwords account who actually took part in designing and approving his campaigns. Google called him because they claimed to like his sites and wanted to see him using PPC to promote BetterNetworker.com

Just a couple weeks later, their compliance department actually slaps the campaigns that Dillard’s Google representative created!

Hence the Google = Morons email that I just received in the mail.

Now the good part of this “I hate Google” movement is that more and more alternatives are being offered to all of us. Stay tuned because I will discuss some of them in my next article.

MLM affiliate marketing HZRXBJ884PMS can contribute greatly to your MLM earnings. Whether you are involved in an MLM funded proposal training and/or lead generation program, or just promoting products to your list, there are some things you do want to keep in mind.

If you believe that the main purpose of any type of MLM affiliate marketing is that of putting commissions in your pocket, think again. Remember that the products and services that you personally recommend by advertising them or sending them as offers in emails are a reflection on you. So choose wisely, and follow these rules:

1. Purchase the product/service yourself. Do not recommend a product that you haven’t tried out yourself. You can do a review of the product before it’s launched, however, with the information that the owner has given to you. But do not actually recommend it until you yourself have tried it and truly feel that it is something that will benefit others.

2. If at all possible, only recommend products that are risk-free. This means that whoever buys it through your link will be able to refund it within at least 30 days (60 is even better) if it’s not everything it’s cracked up to be. I’ve even seen some affiliate marketing offers that offer a 110% return back if it doesn’t work. Now THAT is powerful!

3. Promote products that have been developed by people you know and trust. Ok, you might not personally know every owner of every product. But it makes it a lot more convincing and reliable, if you are purchasing and promoting a product/service from someone that has consistently over-delivered on quality.

If you can follow these three MLM Affiliate marketing rules, your customers and leads will thank you and look forward to your next recommendation!

Getting leads in network marketing today does not mean buying leads (there are sooooo many reasons not to go this route and it will come up in a future post), and it also does not necessarily mean spending lots of money on PPC or other forms of advertising. I’m a big advocate of PPC especially, but I recommend that you start with that only when you really understand how it works, and you have a little bit of money to spend.

In the meantime, take advantage of all of the effective free MLM lead generation options that you can choose from. And there are hundreds of them! This article lists my favorite three at the moment, and I will be updating it as we go. With all of these methods, you must have three things in place before you even start.

1. Know exactly who your audience is. Is it for your potential customers (so you will create content that relates to a certain product that your MLM offers)? Is it for your MLM prospects (so you will offer some type of MLM training, for example)?

2. Know exactly what keywords you want to include, after having done the appropriate keyword research. For an in-depth look into keyword research, please visit

3. Make sure that your content is addressing a certain problem and offering a solution to that problem. It must be real, and it must be valuable to your audience.

With that said, here are my favorite free MLM lead generation methods.

1. Article marketing. If you do like writing, article marketing may be the perfect match for you. This consists of writing articles that interest your MLM customers, or your MLM prospects and then publishing them on free article directories. Your article should generally be between 400 to 700 words long and it must be targeted towards a keyword (keyword phrase) that you have identified in your keyword research. Include the keyword in the title of your article, include it often in the body of your article (it should be 3% at the most), and use it in the last sentence of the article if possible. Also, include a link from your keyword, if possible, to some relevant content.

Possibly even more important than the article itself is the resource box that you put at the end of the article. This is where you can promote whatever it is that you want to promote and link that back to your salespage, blog, or whatever you want your reader to go. This should be short and compelling, with a definite call to action.

While some recommend using article submitters to submit your article to hundreds of article directories (at a charge), I find that you can get similar results by just submitting your article to three main sites: EzineArticles, GoArticles, and ArticleCity.

Remember that you MUST “spin” your articles if you sumit them to more than one site. Change your article around so that it is at least 30% different than the original. Target the same keywords, but switch your title around as well. There are various free (and paid) spinners on the market, but I find that the article usually don’t make much sense after you spin them, so it takes just as much time to spin them and check them over as to rewrite them completely. But that’s just me.

Finally, I’ve heard time and time again that you don’t really need to be a writer to do article marketing well. While it’s true that you do not need to be an expert, it really, really helps if you like writing, so that you can submit content as often as possible. If you don’t, go the outsourcing route and look for someone to write content for you.

Article marketing serves two main purposes: it esablishes you as an authority or expert if you are consistent with your quality content, and it gets links back to whatever you are trying to promote. If your resource box sends readers back to your own blog or website, it can get ranked very quickly and very highly in the search engines because they see these links as a sort of vote for how good your content is, and they will reward you in your ranking.

2. Video Marketing. This is an extremely effective free MLM lead generation process because video is wildly popular right now. You can betch’ur bottom dollar that your customers and prospects go to YouTube, or any of the other video sites, regularly.

The steps of video marketing are similar to those of article marketing, but it is so much easier and faster to throw up a video which address your target audience than it is to write an article. If you’re putting your video on YouTube, it must be under ten minutes, so if you can regularly take ten minutes out of your day, then you’ve got it made.

Simply record a video with your digital camera or Flip (which is what is usually recommended although I just use my camera), and upload it to whatever site you choose. Make sure that your video content includes your keywords, and, of course, so should your video title, description, and tags. And, make sure you have the link that you want to promote at the top of your description.

If you really want to step up your traffic, submit your video through TubeMogul which will then submit it to all popular video sites at once.  Videos are a great way to establish a relationship with your potential customers and prospects. And the more they see of you, the better. If you don’t like doing videos of yourself, you can do a video tutorial which only shows your computer screen

3. Twitter. When I first started learning about Twitter, I hated it. So, I know how you feel if that’s what you are thinking. But, no matter what, you cannot deny the power of Twitter in terms of gaining leads, so get over your dislike or fear or whatever it is, and just get on Twitter.  And again, you want to be where your customers and prospects are–and they ARE on Twitter. It’s quick to set up, and, it’s yet another free MLM lead generation method that really works. You can follow my Twitter 101 tutorials if you need help with that.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of free MLM lead generation strategies–just my top 3 so far in the game! To get my personal recommendation with where you should start, and how to start on the right foot, take a look at the MLM Advantage Training. I’ve got a few free MLM lead generation tricks up my sleeve that have really helped to boost my visibility, and I’d love to share them with you!

You can now publish your Wordpress article (post) from pretty much anywhere! Wordpress has gained in popularity over the years because of its various features, cool plug-ins, and SEO properties, and now, the blogging platform is making it easier than ever to keep your blog current. You can actually just call in your blog posts!

There are many characteristics that define an effective blog. One of them is frequent posting. The obvious problem there is that many of us don’t have the time to update our blogs daily, or even weekly. I’m way behind when it comes to technical stuff, and I just recently learned that you could write and publish your WordPress article not only from your email and desktop, but also from your IPhone, iPad, and Android.

But just yesterday, Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic, has announced an even more technie-cool Wordpress feature – “Post by Voice” powered by Twilio. Enable this on your blog and you get a phone number and unique code that you can use to post the audio (must be under one hour) from your phone to your blog.

Just a couple of warnings. . .you will have to pay any necessary phone charges, and so far, this is only available on Wordpress.com, and not on Wordpress.org. Hopefully they will implement it soon there as well.

Read more about this new WordPress Article feature here.

And if you need help setting up your own Wordpress blog to be a traffic magnet, and in maintaining its effectiveness practically on auto-pilot, go to WordPress Help.

MLM recruiting online is all the rage in the network marketing industry, and has been for quite a few years now. While you may be relieved to hear that you no longer need to pester your family, friends, plumber, hairdresser, or anyone within three feet to join you in your exciting endeavor, you do need to keep in mind that the rules of successful MLM recruiting online are really no different than what works in the offline world. Here are three Do’s to keep in mind.

1. Be respectful of the people that you meet online. If you don’t know them, behave that way. Do not invade their space. Do not “friend” them on Facebook to then blast them with messages or pitches. Do not assume that they want to hear about what you have to offer. They don’t, and if they did, they would ask you. If you are doing any of these things, you have basically taken the 3-foot rule that you so dreaded and moved it to your online neighborhood. And besides being disrespectful, it won’t work.

2. Set up a place where people can come see (on their own free will!!) what a great opportunity you have to offer. This can be likened to your online office. Offer informative, problem-solving, inspirational, how-to content. . .whatever matches what you’re target market is looking for. The information should be compelling, but not hypey. Include your own story here, and all your contact details. If this is your fist “online office”, I recommend creating it at either HubPages or Wordpress.

3. Use traffic methods to invite interested people (and the key word here is interested) to your online office. The quickest and most effective way to do this is through PPC (pay-per-click) advertising. It does require an investment, but you determine how much that is, so learn some PPC basics, invest whatever you can to start out, and go from there. You can then incorporate other paid and free advertising methods along the way. There are hundreds of traffic generating strategies you can use, but if you want immediate results, start with PPC on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Whatever you do online, whether it’s contributing in forums, training on YouTube, meeting and greeting on Facebook, be respectful of the people you come into contact with. Remember, you will learn as much, if not more, from them as you hope to teach them!

Are you using Wordpress? I myself made the switch from blogger to Wordpress a couple of months ago and have immersed myself in the world of plug-ins. You see, that’s how Wordpress automates many of its functions, so, if you have a Wordpress blog, then make sure you have these plug-ins. They will make your blog more effective on the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) front and just easier to maintain.

It’s hard to define exactly what Wordpress plug-ins are (they sound like little devices that you “plug-in” somewhere), but what they basically do is allow you to customize your blog to work for you the way you want it to. There are hundreds of Wordpress plug-ins and, for the most part, the ones that you claim work best for the functions of your blog will differ from those that are more important on another blog, BUT there are a few that everyone agrees are essential, and here they are. . . .

1. The All In One SEO Pack allows you to tweak your meta titles, descriptions and tags without changing the content of your post. In just a few seconds, you can do all this to optimize your SEO. This Wordpress plugin also protects your blog from violating Google’s Duplicate Content, and it offers many other options that you can try. However, the default options have worked just fine for me.

2. Akismet protects your blog against spam, and you definitely need this!

3. Google Analytics tracks your blog so you know how many visitors you are getting and where they are coming from.

4. Google XML Sitemaps helps Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines index your blog more quickly.

5. Sociable allows you to place buttons at the end of your posts so readers can bookmark and share them with others.

New Wordpress plugins are constantly being developed so this may change in the near future. If you need help setting up your Wordpress blog, switching your Blogger blog to Wordpress, or installing these or any other Wordpress plug-ins, fill in your name on the right and I’ll walk you through it step by step!

MLM Selling: 5 Ways to Be Persuasive

So now you’re thinking “what do you mean MLM selling? My MLM sells itself,” right? When I first started looking into network marketing, I did quite a bit of research, and I did listen to several company  presentations of well-established MLM companies. I was surprised (and relieved) to find that, according
to the management of these companies, every single one of them included the words that went something to the effect of “there’s really no need to sell”, or “the product sells itself”, or “just tell a couple friends and you’re on your way.”

Well, the truth is that, if you want to be successful in your network marketing company, you will have
to do some selling. But the good news is that selling these days isn’t all that painful. In fact, the hardest part of the whole thing is finding the people who really want the products/services your company offers, or possibly the ones who want to go into business with you, rather than just pitching your offer to everyone and anyone.

But once you’ve identified the people who are interested in what you have to offer — in fact, who are
actively seeking what you have to offer — the MLM selling part becomes extremely easy. Because you’re
talking to people who are already willing and able to snatch up what it is you have waiting for them.

So, the hard part is actually locating these people–not selling to them. And if you can take a step further, and make it so that THEY find you, rather than YOU finding them, well, then, you are way ahead of the game.

It’s definitely worth spending the time and effort on market research early on because it will save you a ton of time and effort in the long-run. More on how to do that in the next couple of days. . .

For now, back from this tangent to the real story which is an article by AllTop’s Guy Kawasaki, entitled

5 Ways to Be Persuasive

This is a list narrowed down from the Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive book by Dr.
Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin, and Professor Robert Cialdini. You might be surprised that their meaning of
being persuasive isn’t quite what you thought it was in today’s world.

Make sure you read it all and take the “persuasion test” at the end to see how well you score!

Is Twitter one of your MLM tools?

Then you’ve most likely been keeping up with Twitter’s shift from a completely free platform to one that will bring in some advertising revenue from its millions (and quickly growing) of users. The lastest is that you can now pay to promote yourself on the trends list that appears on your Twitter home page. But is a paid trend really a trend?

Find out in Kit Eaton’s article on FastCompany.com:

Twitter’s Adding Paid ‘Fake Trends’ Advertising, But Will Users Object?

See what people are asking and how this could affect your own MLM business. All comments welcome. . .