Mention multi level marketing and you’re likely to get a bunch of mixed responses. MLM has had its success stories and its failures and certainly has a mixed reputation as a genuine home business opportunity.

MLM (also known as network marketing) is essentially the process of marketing a product or service to others and getting those customers to become marketers themselves. There are several varieties but the common thread is the continuation of bringing customers into the system as marketers to form a downline from top to bottom. The person introducing the new folk into the system gets a commission on their sales and on the sales of anyone they also introduce into the system.  Sometimes this can go on for several levels.

The difficulty comes when these systems go too close to the illegal pyramid schemes. Read the rest of this entry »

With so many scams around to trap you I thought it time to do a work at home review in the sense of reviewing work at home opportunities in general terms in the hope it might help guide some of you towards a good path rather than a bad one.

People searching for work at home opportunities fall into several groups:

Entrepreneurs on the lookout for new business ideas
Newly retired or unemployed people looking for alternative incomes
Dissatisfied employees looking for alternatives to their employment
People finding themselves confined to the home by reason of health or young family
People desperate for more money for any reason

I’ve been in pretty much all those categories myself at one stage or another so I can relate to the various driving factors from experience. Are those folks making money?

Read the rest of this entry »

More work at home ideas than you can poke sticks at…

Did you know that netshops.com has a massive affiliate program that you can use to make great commissions on everything from aquariums to writing desks? There are over 200 specialty stores and they have some of the best domain names in marketing which helps to convince potential customers that these are serious businesses and not some back yard operator.

Think you can write a bit about bean bags? Promote BeanBags.com. Know a thing or two about model aircraft? Promote ModelPlanes.com. You can sell cribs or nutcrackers, gloves and mirrors, patio furniture and so much more. Commissions are up to 12% which is generous for physical products, certainly higher than Amazons affiliate program.

With so much choice in products to promote you are bound to have an interest in some of their opportunities. You will need a website which you can get easily and freely from the Wealthy Affiliate University if you don’t already have one. So get to it - find a product you can talk about (there is bound to be one!) write some articles on it for your website and include your affiliate links.

The Netshops Affiliate Program can be joined here

The guys over at Wealthy Affiliate have done it again, surprised us all with their latest development that is. Even if you are an old hand or sceptical or both you’ll soon realise how cool this is.

As affiliates we look for things to promote and angles to promote them from and often shy away from the more competitive areas like say weight loss or dating as we tend to think of them as too crowded.

What the WA guys have done now is to develop a new weight loss product Strip The Fat then they offer up a humongous spread of ways to promote the site and then give you 75% of the sale into the bargain! Read the rest of this entry »

I’m often asked how to pick affiliate products to promote and I tend to answer that I mainly use three ways. The first involves starting with the available traffic, the second is by seeing what products are hot and the third is by using some info I’ve come across somewhere.

Let me explain a bit more on the first one:

Starting with the Available Traffic
This is simply looking at the type of traffic coming into my existing sites, articles, lenses etc, what keywords they are using, where they are from etc or looking at traffic I get from ppc or other sources then deciding on a good product to pitch to that traffic.

A variation on this is to see what traffic you believe you can get easily or cheaply from articles or ppc and then match that to a product. This is a bit more ’stab in the dark’ as you don’t yet know how much traffic you can get or how effective its going to be.

To look at the second method:

Spotting Hot Products
There are a few ways to do this. One is to go to shopping.com or ebay pulse and look through

Read the rest of this entry »