I rarely bother attending free webinars these days. Apart from not having the time (or the ability to sit through sessions up to 3 hours long), most are little more than poorly-presented pitches for new products or training programs.

But tomorrow (Wednesday in the USA, Thursday in Australia and Asia), Better Networker is presenting a free webinar by Katie Freiling, a genuine whiz at building FREE network marketing leads using social media like Facebook and Twitter. She has the runs on the board over the past year to get my attention, very firmly. She’ll be outlining her exact formula in an in-depth interview by Tim Erway, Mike Dillard’s partner.

(Sorry… the webinar is now over.)

That’s 10am Thursday for anyone in Eastern Australia. (Time zone finder here.)

Yes, there’ll doubtless be a sales pitch involved, but that’s fine… fair exchange. (It’s only when a webinar is all feathers and no meat that I lose interest, fast.)

Details and registration are at http://getwwn.com/.

A number of people have been concerned by my prolonged absence and written to ask if I’m okay, given my recent history of deteriorating health. (Thanks sincerely for your concern and your kind messages.)

To make a tortuous saga somewhat shorter, I’ve been unwell again. I returned about 3-4 weeks ago very briefly, overdid things and ended up keeling over yet again. Now I’m back to some kind of balance and I’m determined to pace myself a whole lot better this time. Lynne, some of our daughters and their offspring have been hit hard by the current gastric flu strain. I haven’t yet succumbed (still fighting off early symptoms), thankfully. My immune system seems to be stronger than ever when it comes to contagious stuff.

My health issues are due to three progressive, degenerative neurological conditions (congenital) and spondylitis, which I inherited from my Dad, which is slowly disintegrating my upper spine. I’ve shrunk more than two-and-a-half inches (about 35 mm) in recent years and I suffer a lot of neck and upper spinal problems. My uncle shrank almost 7 inches in a few days when he was in his early 70s. He didn’t survive it. I’ll be 65 in December, so the outlook isn’t too encouraging.

I’ll keep you better-informed now that I’m back on deck. I’m back working with the second generation, in Australia and the USA, to bring them up to speed so that they can take over the day-to-day running of The Profit Clinic and Income Security Network. I’ll introduce them to you over coming months.

Thanks again for your concern, and my sincere apologies for any anxiety or inconvenience caused.

John

This has nothing to do with network marketing directly, but it’s a problem that just keeps growing and interfering with your ability to build your business using email.

Spammers discovered long ago how to use the ignorance, inexperience, laziness and thoughtlessness of other people to build their illegal mailing lists.

They do it by starting all kinds of viral email messages — jokes, weird photos, cartoons, music clips, etc — that other people will mindlessly forward to their friends and colleagues, continually adding to the list of fresh, valid email addresses listed in that ever-expanding message.

The spammers can then harvest and add them to their own mailing lists — and sell them to other spammers.

What most people who forward messages so thoughtlessly fail to realize is that they expose themselves to prosecution and heavy fines for breaching most countries’ privacy laws.

Discover why — and how YOU can prevent it — here:

http://suckerbait.info/how-YOU-support-spammers

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Michael Stelzner has long been regarded as the #1 “go-to” guy for expertise on marketing using white papers, with very good reason. He’s savvy and talented. He gives advice that gets results. For the past year he’s also been publishing outstanding content on using social media for marketing and business building in his excellent “Social Media Examiner” newsletter and blog. If you’re using social media — including social bookmarking and social networking — signing up for Michael’s FREE newsletter (and visiting his super-useful blog) could be the best move you make in 2010. You’ll find them here…

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com

Do yourself a huge favour. Visit soon!

In a long-overdue step in the right direction, the California 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has declared the odious Amway/Quixtar dispute resolution process (and, because it forms part of the IBO Agreement, the entire IBO Agreement) procedurally and substantively “unconscionable”.

[Unconscionable: adjective — not right or reasonable : the unconscionable conduct of his son.
• unreasonably excessive : shareholders have had to wait an unconscionable time for the facts to be established.
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from un- 1 [not] + obsolete conscionable, from conscience (interpreted as a plural) + -able .

In other words, it’s a blatant abuse of the company’s superior negotiating position that stacks the process against the IBO and in the company’s favour. Download the court’s ruling here (PDF).

This is precisely the kind of abuse that I wrote about in my 2007 Insight Report “Is Network Marketing REALLY Dead? (Or does it just smell that way?)” — download your FREE copy from http://isitREALLYdead.com.

Visit Rod Cook’s MLM Watchdog Court Action directory for more information.

The US Patents Office has long been a standing joke around the world for awarding absurd patents that would be rejected out-of-hand in any other country. But now comes a new level of absurdity that’s directly targeting network marketing.

(One can only look forward to the day when some US-based opportunist applies for a patent on the process of breathing in and out sequentially. There seems little doubt that the drones at the US Patents Office will grant their application.)

Specialist MLM attorney, Gerald Nehra, reports today about lawsuits issued against several MLM companies for patent infringement, to wit, a patent on the process of rewarding channel partners for orders placed directly with a brand owner online.

In other words, if a distributor with an MLM company has customers who order directly from that company online, the distributor gets paid their entitlements on that sale.

Read the rest of this entry »

“If you ambition to abolish your cable to this autoresponder, artlessly bang already on the hotlink below.”

That’s one spun version of “If you want to unsubscribe from this autoresponder, simply click on the link below.” It concludes an almost-indecipherable bunch of gibberish that showed up in a Google Alert just now, featuring The Profit Clinic and me. And while the backlink is acceptable to me, the spun content isn’t.

If you want to know the future, look for trends and marry them with known conditions. In this case, spun content — the Internet equivalent of toxic waste — and Google’s stated mission.

This is a company that takes relevance and quality of content very seriously… and punishes offenders mercilessly. Otherwise, it’s pre-eminence as the #1 arbiter of what’s worth looking at online is at risk.(Hmm… that reads like spun content!)

In other words, if Google lets down its guard, it risks losing its credibility with its target audience. If that happens, Adwords and Adsense — 90% of Google’s revenue base — quickly disappear down the gurgler! (Plug-hole for the purists.)

Think of spun articles as like the “flitter” that military aircraft scatter to avoid detection by enemy radar — or the phosphorus flares they drop as decoys for heat-seeking missiles — when flying through enemy airspace.

Their purpose?

To conceal duplicate content from the search engines, especially Google.

It’s not hard to see where this suicidal online version of “crapping in your own nest” is headed. Don’t say you weren’t warned!

You can see the rest of this spun blog post (obviously an autoblog, badly done) here:

http://franchisebusiness.cleanlend.com/

It reads like a 1970s VRC User Manual written by Japanese lab technicians… a nightmare to comprehend.

Here’s a rare opportunity to see me in action, live, in a 12-minute interview with George Fourie, founder of my favourite on-line network marketing community, http://thatMLMbeat.com.

(Are you a member yet?)

It’s rare on several counts:

• I look almost respectable and reasonably well-groomed.
• I’m live (well, recorded live. Next best/worst thing.)
• I don’t dribble or spit for the entire interview.
• I’m surprisingly coherent.
• I don’t bite George.
• I smile occasionally!

(I’ll leave it to you to sort out which are true. Or not.)

But the interview does manage to give you some sense of where I come from in terms of training for network marketers. You can view it here.

A US$45 million court judgment against a hyped-up, vaporware mobile phone service MLM by its major supplier is yet another reminder that these kinds of products and services are rarely suited to the network marketing distribution model.

Take a look at these three articles, first published in 1999 and 2000, and see why little has changed but the names.

• Why commodities and utilities are unsuited to network marketing
  
• The MLM Truth Telecoms Report
• Why Internet-related MLMs are more hi-risk than hi-tech!

It’s time to get REAL, folks!