Dear readers,

There is a new mlm spam email going around. I’m now receiving several spam emails a day all using this same message:

Subject: I have a question about Ambit Energy

Hello,

I was searching online to find more info about Ambit Energy and I came across your information.

Can you tell me, are you still involved with Ambit Energy? If you are, how are things going for you?

Please let me know.

Sincerely,

Spam emails like this give our industry a bad name.

So far I’ve received at least 6 of these emails that got through my spam filters. Maybe there were more that got caught!  They seem to insert random company names.  I received a few with ACN, one used Isagenix, and couple Ambit Energy emails.  I’ve never been a distributor with any of those companies.  This is not email from a genealogy list. This is a spam. They don’t have my name. They don’t know what companies I’ve really been with.

I got tricked the first time I saw this email.  I replied to the guy and had an email conversation with him.  The email looked legit and although I had never been with ACN I had been with similar companies way back in the day.

Don’t get tricked into joining email spammers! Don’t get tricked into thinking this is the next best “system” to automatically sponsor people.  What happens when the spam filters catch on and block your emails? Then your entire “system” is shut down and you have to go back to sponsoring distributors the old fashioned way

- Ben Fitts

MLM Training > MLM Hall of Shame

Several people are very angry with me over my comments about Kooday.

A couple people complained that I called it PPC.  Sorry about that. Let’s call it PPK.  It’s a new business model so not sure what to call it. You aren’t paying per click but like PPC you are buying keywords. If you don’t want me to call it PPC or PPK you tell me what to call it and I’ll start calling it that.

I stand by my judgment that Kooday is at least a rip off if not a downright scam.  They are at least selling a product that doesn’t exist. They are at least exhibiting some suspicious behavior that you should be wary of.

No one has refuted my statement that Kooday doesn’t HAVE a search engine yet.  Yes they are selling keywords but they don’t have a search engine yet.

All you have to do to have a search engine is license an existing search engine. There are companies out there that specialize in this.  I saw an advertisement earlier for a company that licenses search engine software starting at $350 a month.  What I don’t understand is how can they be selling ads for a product that doesn’t exist yet? Shouldn’t it be easy for them to have a search engine? Don’t they have the money to license some software? Sure the $350 software might not work for them, but the point is that there are options available!

A few people told me that Kooday allows refunds. This led me to do further investigation.  Kooday’s terms of service say :

Kooday has the right to amend or add to our terms and conditions as it deems necessary and can enforce changes that affect its business plans at any time.

Due to the type of services that Kooday offers no refunds will be given. If your account has been terminated because of infractions of our terms or conditions then no refund will be given.

There are  a couple of concerning elements there.  You can mantain the rights to change the agreement but you have to state how users will be notified of the change.  You also should include contact information.  If you look at some of the web site approval services these are things they require that are suspiciously absent from Kooday’s terms and conditions.

Second of all Kooday says in their terms and conditions that they do not allow refunds.  That seems to go against what everyone else is saying about Kooday allowing refunds.  At the very least it shows that Kooday could change their policy at any time since you’ve agreed to the terms and conditions that say you are not able to get refunds.

Where is the privacy policy?  No record of a privacy policy at all.  So what are they going to do with my information when I sign up?  Are they going to sell my information?  Why isn’t there a privacy policy? Why is there only a terms and conditions/terms of service?

Another concerning thing about Kooday is they lack contact information on their web site. If this was a legitimate business they’d have customer support information, contact information, a link to their helpdesk, and even a toll-free number.  Heck I’m a one man show and I even put my phone number, skype, email, etc on my web site.

Why when I click the about Kooday button does it only take me to a sales page pitching me on buying keywords? Why doesn’t it have any information on the company, the founders, etc?

Am I the only one that finds these things disturbing about Kooday?

Maybe Kooday is totally legitimate.  Maybe they just are new business people.  Maybe these are issues they aren’t aware of.

Are you really sure you want to promote them? Are you sure you want to associate your name and reputation with a company that has this many risk factors?

Not me.  I agree with Janet Legere.  I’d rather wait 6 months to see how this pans out. If it is a legitimate business I can still hop on board 6 months from now.  I can still buy some long tail keywords.

- Ben Fitts

Disagree? I’d love to hear your opinion.

PS. there are no affiliate links in this post.

MLM Training > MLM Hall of Shame

Dear surfer,

I have a warning for you today about a new online business opportunity called Kooday.

I don’t want to call Kooday a scam because I don’t know enough about it. But I certainly do want to warn you about it.

You see when people are new to the internet and home business they fall prey to a lot of these so called “opportunities”.  These scams, rip offs, con artists, or whatever you want to call them make these opportunities that sound great but are really full of false promises.  They make a big splash because everyone wants in on the latest greatest opportunity, but one day people wise up.

Kooday is a new pay per click search engine.  They are being marketed heavily in some internet circles right now and there is a lot of buzz.

They are selling themselves saying that you can buy keywords.  You can then rent those keywords to other people who want to use the same keyword, thereby earning yourself commissions. You can also recommend others to Kooday.

The issue isn’t whether or not that could work.  It could work.  You certainly could make some money now if you get started early and sell a lot of keywords.  However…. Long term buying keywords will only work if people actually search on Kooday.  What good is it to own a keyword if no one ever uses  the web site to search?

The real difficulty with search engines is how do you get a percentage of the market? How do you get people to search your web site instead of searching using Google or Bing?

Here is a warning right from the Kooday home page August 30, 2010:

Our Webcrawlers have not yet been turned on and once activated relevant results will be displayed. Our algorithm will impress the world. Currently our directory content is being used in beta and search relevancy is not accurate.

Kooday is admitting they don’t even have “relevant search results” yet.   At this point Kooday is selling false promises.  They are selling keywords in a search engine but they don’t even have a search engine yet!  Shouldn’t they have launched the search engine first?

This has happened at least 2x that I know of in the past.   Search Big Daddy and Search Estate both tried to take over the search engine market.  They allowed you to buy keywords just like Kooday is.  SBD even had some programs to pay surfers for searching their web site.  Yet they never took off.  They didn’t have enough people searching to make it worthwhile.

If there are only a small number of searchers using a search engine only the most popular keywords will receive enough clicks to make buying them worthwhile. Keywords that are not popular may go days or weeks without someone searching for them.  Advertisers give up because they’re paying for keywords that are never clicked.

The other thing to think about here is… if there wasn’t a business opportunity attached to it, who would use Kooday? Sure people would want to buy some keywords just in case it works out… but there wouldn’t be nearly as many people doing it… especially since the Kooday search engine doesn’t even work yet!

Is Kooday a scam? Maybe. Is it going to fail in 1 year? Most likely.

Could you buy some keywords and hold on to them in case it works? Certainly… but just be careful.  Don’t invest too much time or money into something like Kooday.  Don’t let it take time and energy away from building your real business.

- Ben Fitts

PS. No affiliate links were used.  This was not some trick to try and get you to buy Kooday ads through me. I genuinely don’t like the service and would not spend a dime there.  I’m not even comfortable giving them my credit card.  At least when Search Big Daddy and Search Estate launched they HAD a search engine in place.   Kooday doesn’t even have that yet! Smells like a rip off to me.

PPS. This is my opinion based on 17 years of being on the internet and 13 years of doing internet marketing. I’ve seen a lot of these come and go.

PPS. Some people are mad that I call it PPC.  I dunno what to call it? PPK?  Pay Per Keyword?

MLM Training > MLM Hall of Shame

Dear reader,

Building a successful network marketing business is NOT about You making money!!!

It is about helping others make money!!!

Does that make sense?

When you help others make money you will all make money. If you get to be really good at helping others make money then I assure you, you’ll be wealthy. You’ll never have a hard time finding people to join your business. EVERYONE will want too.

Here is what made me write about this.

This guy I met online was promoting  this new social network (SWOM).  This social network targets people like you and I. It targets other network marketers.

I have seen many of these come and go.  The problem is they are sold to networkers like you and I. Being networkers we all buy into the hype. Mostly because we’re entrepreneurs and looking for additional revenue streams.  Here is where the problem comes in: We are all already in business opportunities. We’re not looking for new opportunities. They pitch us on the idea that we can market our business to a bunch of other networkers but it never seems to work out that way.

A lot of people join thinking this is going to be the next Facebook.  They usually go strong for 6 months and then begin to die out slowly.  Once all the rush of networkers joins there is no one else to join except new people just getting started in network marketing.  They don’t attract the public because the public wants to go to Facebook where 500 million people are.  They don’t want to go to a social network for network marketers pitch them on deals every day. be

Anyway, I was letting this guy know that promoting a program like that isn’t worth it.  That these programs usually die out.  Here was his response.

I have made over $700 with Swom, if the site closed down tomorrow I would still be in profit. So I do not understand what your point is. Please if you are going to make inflammatory comments about other peoples biz-op’s, make sure you know what you are taking about first .

I bolded and underlined a couple of points in his message. He basically said “F-You I made my $700″.  He doesn’t care if the program dies.  He has made his money!

That is the problem with a lot of network marketers. I feel that is one of the reasons why MLM and network marketing get’s a bad reputation.  You have people out there that are greedy and only care about themselves. They don’t care about helping others.

When you promote programs like this you hurt your reputation.  I’m not going to call SWOM a scam.  I doubt it is a scam.  However I do know SWOM is doomed.  Everyone going there is going to sell people on their opportunity but everyone there  already has an opportunity.  That is a recipe for failure.  When the average person discovers they aren’t going to get any sign ups they will quit SWOM.

I am sure you could join SWOM and make money at it.  However making a quick $700 isn’t worth hurting or risking my reputation on a business that won’t be around long.  Come back to me this time next year and tell me SWOM is alive and doing great. Then I’ll take a look at it.  My reputation isn’t worth that risk.

That is why focusing on helping others is important. Your reputation is in tact.

If you only focus on helping yourself make money you will hurt others in the process. You will hurt your reputation in the process.  Sure a sucker is born every minute and you can continue to market programs and make money, but not very many people will stick with you.

I have people who stick with me. If I promote stuff I have people I know will buy anything I recommend. Why? Because they have benefited from working with me in the past. They’ve made money. I’ve taught them stuff. They know, like, and trust me.  That is worth a lot more than $700 to me!

Making money in networking marketing is about helping others.

Agree? Disagree? Want to spam me with your SWOM links? Want to tell me I’m wrong?  I’d love to hear from you!

- Ben Fitts

PS. This week one of those people that trusts me asked me about paying for a SWEEVA membership. (see the graphic for sweeva in the sidebar.) I told her no.  I told her no because I don’t think her product would market well on Sweeva.  I didn’t want her to buy something from me that wasn’t right for her.  I didn’t think loosing that trust from her was worth the money I’d make from selling her Sweeva when it wasn’t going to benefit her.

MLM Training > MLM Hall of Shame

If you’re a network marketer and you’ve been in business for awhile at some point you may be offered a chance to buy mlm genealogy lists. Many people consider these to be the creme de la creme of mlm leads because they are people who are already familiar with our industry. However there are some things I feel it is important to warn you about.

Tonight I received a phone call offering to sell me MLM Genealogy leads. Let’s call this woman Ms. B.

Ms. B. told me she had a list of YTB people to sell. She said she had heard some bad things about YTB and that the company might be shutting down. She said she had about 8400 names, phone number, email, and address for YTB people to sell and she was calling me because she thought someone in my company might be interested in them. She thought these people might be looking for a new opportunity.

Being an ethical guy, little warning bells started going off in my head…

After she gave me her pitch I asked a few questions.

Question 1.
Why aren’t you using the leads yourself? Why are you trying to sell them?

Ms. B answered.
She has a lot of MLM experience but she prefers to be a leads broker and she has a lot of experience brokering these kind of leads. Her family were MLMers but she never really got into that side of the business.

More warning bells are going off for me. Why doesn’t she do MLM? Did she sell these to family members or friends already? If they are so great why isn’t she working them?

Question 2.
How many times are you going to sell these leads?

Ms. B answered.
Anyone selling you leads would be lying if they said they didn’t sell them multiple times. However she said since it was a small list she would only sell these 3-6 times and would give me 3 months exclusivity before selling them to anyone else in my company.

This was pretty honest. She is right leads companies sell leads more than once.

Question 3.
How fresh are these leads?

Ms. B answered.
18-24 months old.

More warning bells are going off now. If they are 18-24 months old, why are they just now going up for sale? Has she been selling them for the last 18 months? Did the person generating the leads already milk the leads as much as they could before selling them off to someone else?

Question 4.
How were these leads generated? Were they from an existing YTB members genealogy list?

Ms. B answered.
These names were generated from web sites of YTB members on the internet. Someone wrote a program to capture the names, emails, phone, and address of YTB members from the internet.

At this point I’m livid with anger. You see I run web marketing web sites for my company. I HATE people like this. This person is what we call a “scrapper”. They scrape the content of web sites. They find someone who has YTB marketing web sites and they scrape the content to find the name, email, address, phone, etc.

If you’re someone like me that runs marketing web sites for team members of my company, what happens is this person points a computer program we call a “bot” which is short for robot. They point the bot at your web site. Then the bot tries a bunch of different combinations of usernames until it find someone that exists. It then scrapes the content off the site for the name, email, phone, etc. and puts that info a database. It then continues trying more variations of usernames.

Besides this being unethical it is also a computer attack. They generate tens of thousands of requests or even hundreds of thousands of requests on the web site in order to find a few thousand names. It can even temporarily break a web site, cause a web site to perform poorly, etc.

In addition I feel this is unethical behavior. I feel that people who try and steal genealogy lists are bad apples. I would hate for someone to attack my downline and try and steal them all away for some new opportunity and I would never want to do that to someone else.

Ms. B. couldn’t believe that I was upset. She couldn’t believe that I didn’t understand that this is they way business is done. She claimed that because this information was freely available on the internet that I was upset.

Needless to say the phone call ended shortly thereafter and I won’t be recommending anyone to her.

I hate people like this. She isn’t a networker so she has no idea how dirty her behavior is. She can never truly understand because she doesn’t have a downline. Or maybe this is one reason why she doesn’t do MLM herself and only brokers MLM genealogy leads.

What do you think? Have you ever bought a genealogy list? Have you ever bought lists that were generated from spamming/scraping web sites? Have you ever had someone attack your downline to try and steal them away to another company?

- Ben

MLM Training > MLM Hall of Shame