Hi everyone,

Sunday February 22nd there is a GREAT Free Webinar for MLMers looking to generate more QUALITY leads.

This is the Free Robert Kiyosaki CD program where people can request a free copy of the Robert Kiyosaki interview about the perfect business opportunity.

With this tool I generated 22 leads last month. All of whom have purchased a free audio cd (they paid for shipping) and have given me a real physical address (because they are receiving a cd by mail.) Then I have a 5 card follow up campaign I implement using Send Out Cards to follow up with them.

I encourage ALL of you to get on this webinar Sunday, February 22nd.

Click here to reserve your seat now before they are all taken!

And if you have any questions about the program, how it works, how I’m promoting it, etc. Just leave a comment or use the link on the right to contact me.

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 29% [?]

Hi everyone,

Would you like to meet me next week in San Diego?

I’ll be in San Diego from February 27th to March 1st.  I’ve got a personal development seminar I’m attending on the 28th.  Would you like to be my guest?  I’d be happy to have you come with me and we can have lunch and talk about business, internet marketing, or whatever. I will even pay your way.

If you’re interested in meeting me in San Diego on February 28th just use the contact form and let me know!

If you don’t want to attend the personal development seminar I’ll have some time in the early afternoon on Friday.  Then I’ll be having dinner with a large group of my Send Out Cards team. Perhaps we could meet up before dinner?

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 28% [?]

In my 2009 business plan I’ve laid out a plan of action.  One new activity every single week.  New actions to expand my business.

My week 5 action is to lookup old friends.

You might think, you don’t want to spam your old friends, and I agree! I don’t want to spam anyone!

In my opinion your MLM enterprise is about building relationships. EVERYTHING we do is about building relationships.  Working with your customers and getting referrals from them is about realtionships. Working with your downline and helping them grow their business is about building relationships, and trust with them. Being a mentor to them.  Helping hold them accountable.

Prospects? Same thing.  Most prospects are joining someone because they feel that person can help them achieve their dreams and their goals.

So how does that apply to my old friends?  You have realtionships with these people already. Why not expand on those relationships and friendships? You never know when the time is going to be right for someone.  I’m not talking about spamming them with your opportunity, but just renewing that friendship and seeing where it will go.

I use Facebook a lot. To me, it’s a more grown up version of Myspace.  I also find it’s easier to find people and make connections on Facebook.  I’ve been able to connect with quite a few old friends as a result of Facebook.  One of them has expressed some interest in my business and is even working with me part-time as a programmer.  I didn’t renew the friendship for that. I renewed the friendship because he is a friend.  We all need more friends in our lives.  The fact that he started to work for me and is planning to join my MLM business is just a result of our friendship.  It’s a product of learning what his needs are and that he needed to supplement his income.

Some other web sites you can use to find friends are Classmates.com.  That’s a good one for looking people up by school affiliation.  Another good one which is becoming popular for baby boomers is BoomJ. A new one that is a bit different but still can help build realtionships is Twitter.

How many old friends have you connected with recently?

Got questions about these web sites? Leave a comment and let me know!

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 34% [?]

I hope you get some “brownie” points this week (And if you want to send a gift people who become customers can use my web site to send gifts like candles, brownies, gift baskets, etc.)

Popularity: 36% [?]

Hello there loyal readers

How was your day? Did you have a succesful day in your MLM enterprise?

I have owned HomeBusinesInterviews.com for ages.  I just didn’t do anything with it. I’m proud to say I have begun working on the site and hope to launch a new podcast very soon.

We’ll be interviewing experts in MLM, internet marketing, and personal development.

Do you know anyone that you’d like me to interview? I’d love to hear your suggestions!  Leave me a comment and let me know or click on the contact link to the far right and send me a private message.

I’m really looking forward to this! This is going to be a great tool for learning more about our industry and getting to meet some great people!

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 38% [?]

I hate to say I told you so, but I did.

Yesterday I wrote about the latest MLM fad and encouraged you to avoid it.  The fad is called Chat to Text.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one that didn’t think this was a good idea.  Facebook shut down Chat to Text yesterday.

I quote from the Chat to Text web site.

UPDATE – Facebook just shut down the application as of 9:42pm Eastern Time Monday, Feb. 2nd. Don’t worry, everyone that paid already will still receive their commission as per our agreement. But let’s get this back up and running…this is a way for ALL of us to make money. As you all know, MLM is legal and MLM works…this was exploding and Facebook may even have felt threatened by us.

WE NEED YOUR HELP!!! POST YOUR COMMENTS TO THIS NEW FACEBOOK GROUP – WHAT DO YOU THINK???

Email Facebook to tell them this is a legitimate business model that doesn’t violate any terms. Read Facebook’s terms for yourself, ChatToText doesn’t violate ANY of them! Here is the email they sent, a 5-second copy/paste email:

————————To the developer of ChatToText, application ID #43000236800,

Your application has been disabled for violating Facebook terms and policies.

For further information, please email platform-policy@facebook.com .  Please note that attempting to recreate this application may result in further action.

Sincerely,

Facebook Platform Developer Operations & Support

And just as Chat to Text is trying to create buzz and get support for their application there are groups of people forming who are trying to make sure they stay banned from Facebook.

Here is the group you should join if you want to keep Chat to Text off Facebook.

The problem with Chat to Text wasn’t that they charged money for a facebook application but that they were doing MLM.

You might wonder why I am upset by this. I do MLM and make a full time living doing MLM.  My issue with it wasn’t that it was MLM but that there wasn’t any real residual income here to be made.  All the money was up front money from selling the application AND it was an application that I felt I’d never want to use.

To be honest I don’t do much Facebook chat anyway. Why would I want Facebook chat to come through to my cell phone? That’d be annoying to me and I bet a lot of people would start to use the application, find text messages to their phone annoying and turn it off.

I felt like a lot of people were promoting it not because they liked the product but because they wanted to make money referring the product to other people. Or perhaps even worse, the product was only $6, so “why not” try it.  That’s a pretty bad way to build an MLM.  You will end up with a lot of unhappy people when they realize they wasted their money.

Apparently I was right.

If you are an established MLMer you have to beware of the junk you promote.  Several of my friends started promoting this junk.  One was even promoting it as “Facebook has gone MLM”. You have to remember that your reputation is more important than a quick paycheck. WHO CARES IF I CAN MAKE A PROFIT PROMOTING IT.  It takes bigger guts to not promote something.  If I don’t have to promote every little thing that comes up it shows I’m serious.  And I have a better reputation.

Remember the old tv commercials “When EF Hutton talks people listen”?  People would be at a restaurant eating. It would be very noisy.  Then one of the guys would start to talk and everyone would suddenly stop talking to hear what he had to say.  Then the voice over would come on and say “When EF Hutton talks people listen”.

That’s how you want to be perceived. You want people to listen to what you have to say.

What do you think? Do you think I’m crazy? Do you think ChatToText will be back on Facebook?

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 36% [?]

Do you notice a theme in my 2009 business plan?

A lot of my action items are intended to stretch my personal development and help me grow better as a person as well as to grow my business.

For week 4 my action item is to speak to 10 people I wouldn’t normally talk to.  Again I do this because I want to get out of my comfort zone and stretch myself.  Maybe one of these people will be my next big leader? You never know.  The goal is to combat my fear and to go out and do something about it.  The only way I’ve found to handle fear is to take action.

So week 4 what am I going to do?  Cold Call 10 people?  Call on 10 local businesses?

I’ve already done one of those. I contacted a friend to try and get a presentation at her local real estate office.  Now I just need to setup 9 more similar activites.

I’m going out this week to take action on this and I’ll post a follow up for you later this week.

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 35% [?]

The latest MLM fad

Heads up people,

It’s the newest MLM fad that I encourage you to AVOID.

It’s called “chat to text” and it’s a new facebook application that allows people to visit your facebook page and then send you chat messages.  They sales pitch says you don’t even have to be at your computer you can receive the chat messages via text to your cell phone.

UHM. Hello?  I don’t WANT chat messages sent to my cell phone.  That would be extremely annoying! It could also get expensive if you aren’t on a flat rate instant messaging plan.

Once again this is something I think that people are promoting because there is a business opportunity/affiliate program associated with it.  Everyone pays $6 to install the application to their facebook page.  I don’t think they are promoting it because they really think it’s a good idea.

It SOUNDS like a good idea but in reality I bet a lot of people who start using this chat to text will end up turning off the damn thing off when it gets too annoying.

Just my 2cents.

I could be totally wrong here of course but I’d rather not be the person out promoting the latest junk all the time.  I’d rather be the person who people trust because I don’t promote every junk program to come to me in email.

Sure it’s only $6. That’s actually the psychology they are using.  For $6 most people will just say yes and do it.  Even if they don’t like it and don’t use it, it was just $6 right?  It’s the same principal behind $7 secrets. They sold a bunch of cheap ebooks and products for $7 because it minimizes returns, minimizes support, etc.  It doesn’t mean those products were any good.

Agree? Disagree?

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 36% [?]

Hi everyone,

Last week I talked about PPC Web Spy. I suggested downloading the free version.

Some people have pointed out that it might not be all it’s cracked up to be.

I want to share that with you.  Grizz an internet marketer who is in the make money online niche. He downloaded the software and apparently like me paid for the upgrade and tried to sell a few copies.

Here is Grizz’s blog post.

He brings up a few good points. And I think you could benefit from reading them. Warning: Grizz’s blog is horribly ugly and has tons of PPC ads and crap on it.  You can’t even SEE the blog post until you scroll down at least one screen. BUT the guy makes a lot of sense.  Ignore the ugly blog for now and read his post. It’s worth checking out.

Primarily I purchased the product because I saw a few good referrals, one from someone I trust who doesn’t promote a lot of stuff.  Secondly I purchased the product because although the sales pitch sounded too good to be true I had to try it out. If I could really spy on what keywords other people were buying I’d be ecstatic. For example there are people who actually buy PPC ads on my name! “Ben Fitts” and “Benjamin Fitts” both have people in the MLM niche buying ads on my name.  I’d love to see what other keywords they were buying, how much they might be paying, etc.

Like Grizz I’ve been a bit concerned that the data doesn’t seem to be accurate.  Grizz and some other readers of his blog say that they thinks the data is basically just Google data not advertiser specific and similar to Brad Callen’s other product “SEO Elite”.

One of the biggest concerns they bring up that I’ve also noticed is let’s say I look up “buy perfume at Sephora” you’d expect that to be one of the top keywords that shows up when you look at the advertisers.  Instead you see a bunch of other generic keywords for “perfume” or “4711 cologne” or whatever. You don’t necessarily see the keyword you were doing research on! (they show 50 keywords in the free version and 100 in the paid version.)

That’s a big concern.  That’s one reason why they are suggesting that the tool really doesn’t know what keywords a specific advertiser is bidding on.  Certainly it doesn’t know any real data. They might even have some results that say this advertiser bids on thousands of terms but we don’t get to see that, and I can’t necessarily find the keyword I wanted to see.

Then there’s another issue.  My dad’s site for example.  My dad is one of the only certified Granicrete installers in Connecticut and Rhode Island.  So I put together a web site and bought some PPC ads targetted to Rhode Island and Connecticut.  According the PPC Web Spy this advertiser is brand new.  They can’t see the ads for him so they have no data.  Maybe that’s because they are doing their data mining somewhere else where our PPC ads don’t appear?  I dunno but it certainly makes the tool less valid because it won’t have local advertisers PPC terms.

Having said all that… I’d like to change my recommendation on PPC Web Spy to a wait and see.  Wait and see how the tool improves. I’d be very curious to see if Brad Callen releases some updates or something or whether or not he just goes to the bank and cashes his checks. We’ll see.

For now I’m even considering turing the plugin off.  I’m not real happy with the results I can see of other people’s keywords so it really isn’t doing much good for me.

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 33% [?]