While doing absolutely nothing, I added more people to my Varolo village and I’m starting to earn steady money just by watching ten to fifteen minutes of ads every evening.

I also discovered another very cool network marketing opportunity.  This one costs a nominal monthly amount to get involved.  That nominal fee is easy to make back without sponsoring a single person!  That Free Thing is all about showing you how to get free stuff.  And no, I’m not talking about those lame offers for free gift cards or electronics that require you to fill out pages and pages of surveys and complete only 300 offers!

I’m talking genuine free stuff–all brought to you in one easy website.  The first week after I joined, I was able to get free prescription eyeglasses for my husband.  At a $300 value (I only paid $15.00 for shipping), I could be a member of That Free Thing for two years before I paid that amount in monthly fees.  And of course I will be getting other free things too.  They post new offers daily.

So you can join That Free Thing just for the freebies and you’ll more than get your money back.  But I said it was also an income earning opportunity, and here’s where it gets very interesting.  There are two separate ways to get compensated and those two ways work together to add up to big bucks for members.

The first is a simple reward system for sponsoring new members.  You earn directly on each of your referrals–40% for your direct referrals and 30% on your second and third level referrals.  You earn 40% or 30% of what your referrals earn through the program.

The second way to get paid is through a forced 3 x 8 matrix.  Each level of the matrix pays at different percentages of the members’ ongoing fees.  Since you can only add three people directly under you, any additional people you sponsor get added to your second level.  This means that when you join you are likely to get some spillover from whoever sponsored you.

The sooner you join under me, the more likely you are to get spillover as more people join after you, so take the time to study the opportunity, but once you decide it’s for you, don’t delay.

Remember, even without the network marketing rewards, you do get lots of opportunities to get free stuff just for joining!

Giveaway Dates:
Monday February 14th 2011 @ 07:00:00 AM PST
To
Thursday February 24th 2011 @ 01:00:00 PM PST

Participate in the Escape the Rat Race Giveaway!

Giveaway Dates:
Friday February 18th 2011 @ 07:00:00 AM PST
To
Monday February 28th 2011 @ 01:00:00 PM PST

Participate in the Colossal Giveaway Event!

Before the giveaway part of the event formally opens, you can become a contributor, which means you can list your free bonus gift in the event.

Just like you would normally do to build your email opt-in list, you offer the free bonus in exchange for each recipient’s email address.  The difference is that when you contribute to the Giveaway Event you benefit from the promotion of the event as a whole.

The first thing you need is a free gift.  You can write your own special report or ebook.  You can also develop videos, software or graphics or just about anything downloadable you can think of.

If you don’t care to compose your own bonus, then you need to find something online that you can give out for free.

I highly recommend you take the time to create your own product.

First, you won’t have to worry about it being a duplicate gift.  These Giveaway Events do not allow duplicate gifts.

Second, you need to understand that the only reason the recipient will opt in to your email list is because they are after the free gift.  There is a good chance that the only email from you he or she will ever open is the one with the download link.  If it’s your product, it can contain your affiliate links.  Then when the recipient gets around to reading it, you might at least make some money off an affiliate sale or two.  The next best option to creating your own product is to offer one that you can rebrand with your own affiliate links.

Once you have your bonus product, you of course need to have an email list management service.  I use ListWire because it is free and has all the capabilities of the autoresponders you pay for.  Because it is free, the creator of ListWire makes his money off it by insisting you stay subscribed to his own email list (if you try to unsubscribe you lose your account), and each of your subscribers gets presented with the opportunity to buy one of his products as soon as they confirm their subscription to your list.  If you don’t want to deal with ListWire’s quirks, then use AWeber.  It is affordable and highly recommended by the top Internet marketers.  It will take you some time to learn how to use either ListWire or AWeber and to develop your autoresponder sequence and opt-in forms.

Once you are all set to collect and follow up wtih email addresses, registering as contributor to a Giveaway Event is fairly simple.  You click on the link to register from the home page, enter your email address and user ID you’d like to use.  You will be sent a password.

Once you have completed your registration, you will be hit with anywhere from one to four one time offers.  You should know that your only opportunity to upgrade in the giveaway is right after you register.  In this case, it really is a one time offer!  You also need to know that when you register as a contributor for the event, you are also opting in to the event administrator’s email list.  He’s definitely using the event to build his list!  You do not need to confirm anything after you fill out the initial registration form for the event itself, and you are taken automatically to your members area.  You do receive a request to confirm your subscription to the event administrator’s list.  Confirm if you do indeed wish to be added to his list, but it won’t impact your membership in the event in any way.  It took me a couple events to figure that one out.

Should you upgrade your membership or not?  So far I have stuck with the free options and turned down all those one time offers.  Upgrading buys your gift more exposure and allows you to upload more than one gift in the event.  If you upgrade, you will get more people subscribing to your list and downloading your gift than you would as a free contributor, so that is the main advantage of upgrading.  I gained about ten new subscribers from the first event I contributed to and I learned that there are lots more events coming up.  My strategy at this point is to register as a free contributor to as many as I can.  It takes five minutes to set up your gift and if each event gains me ten subscribers I figure I’m doing pretty well at building my list.  It’s your choice.  If you’re not sure, stick to the free membership and know that you will always be able to upgrade your  membership in the next event.

The first thing you should do once you get into the members area is click on the manage your gift tab.  There you will upload an image of your gift and fill in a short and slightly longer description of your gift, the url for the squeeze page and the direct download link.  Your squeeze page cannot contain any advertisements so create a completely separate squeeze page for the event.  Your gift has to be downloadable–it can’t be a free web-based course or free membership.   When you’ve submitted your gift its status will be pending until the administrator has a chance to review and accept it.

Update your profile after you’ve submitted your gift.  You’ll get to upload a picture of yourself and fill in some information such as your ClickBank ID and a few other things.  That information is optional and it mostly applies to upgraded members (or people who responded to the one time offers), but I would at least put in your picture so people participating in the event can see who you are.

At this point you just have to wait for your gift to be approved.

Your next job is to promote the event.  These events have rules that all contributors need to have some unique clicks coming through their event affiliate link or their gift will get removed.

Before the giveaway part opens, your promotion efforts will be geared towards referring other contributors.  You get points for every referral and those points affect the ranking of your gift.  The highest ranked gifts get shown on the first page, whereas the gifts of people who don’t get referrals get put on page 19 or so.  That’s where my gift sat for my first event (and I still gained ten subscribers).

After the giveaway part opens, it is closed to new contributors and you promote it as a place people can go to download all sorts of freebies.

I’ve chosen to promote these events as a whole rather than individually.  In my article marketing efforts I link to my category on Giveaway Events so that visitors will always see the most current events that automatically show up on top (rather than the expired ones).  In this way, as long as I participate in these events, my back links will always be current.

The next step is to watch your list of subscribers grow.  As I said before, you do need to understand that any subscribers you gain from a Giveaway Event are there because they want the freebies.  They undoubtedly have downloaded at least half a dozen other bonuses and opted into that many lists.  This means that you are competing very heavily for their attention.  It is important that your bonus have value and lots of it.  It is also important that you make it clear in your very first follow up message that your email updates have value, and lots of it.  Be clear about what they can expect from your updates, so that they know they should open your subsequent emails.  Be brief so they can learn it quickly while scanning for your download link.  Then deliver that value in every email you send out afterwards.

Giveaway Dates:
Monday February 14th 2011 @ 09:00:00 AM CST
To
Monday February 28th 2011 @ 03:00:00 PM CST

Participate in the Valentines Day JV Giveaway!

The Let Them Eat Cake Giveaway Event starts very soon.  If you want to contribute, you need to get on it immediately.

If you want to download a bunch of free ebooks, software and graphics, you only have to wait a couple more days.

Giveaway Dates:
Thursday February 10th 2011 @ 07:00:00 AM PST
To
Friday February 18th 2011 @ 01:00:00 PM PST

Rather than promote each event individually I will simply promote the category as a whole.

Any time you want to either contribute to an event or take advantage of all the freebies that are offered at these events, all you have to do is click on the Giveaway Event category and you can choose among the most current events to participate in.

I will also be adding some articles about how these events work and how to make the most of them, and file them under Giveaway Event Tips, so stay tuned.

It happens to be a blog I recently started contributing to.

It started out with the decision to do some networking on Facebook. Phillip Dews, the website owner, and I hit it off right away once we figured out we’d given our sites similar names. He then opened up Internet Marketing 101 for guest blogging and I jumped on it.

So begins my adventure as a guest blogger. So far it’s been fun.  I’m at the beginning of a completely new learning experience.

I’ve also come to some conclusions about the future of both Internet marketing and network marketing.

The advantage of being relatively new to both fields (I’ve barely touched network marketing and I’ve been involved in Internet marketing for just under one year) is that I don’t have as many entrenched assumptions as someone who has been successful in it for a long time.  This means I can see new things and I’m not attached to old assumptions.

Here’s what I see.  First, it doesn’t take much of a rocket scientist or an economist to see that we live in a time where wealth is rapidly getting concentrated into the hands of large entities–corporations, governments, individuals who are already worth millions.  On the flip side, the rest of us are slowly getting squeezed.  You have people losing their jobs and finding it difficult to find a new job because so many jobs have moved overseas.  We’re starting to experience inflation (thanks to the Fed’s runaway money printing) so the money we do have doesn’t go as far as it used to.

I mention these not to complain but to give a bit of a backdrop towards a huge trend I see.

The trend is towards those opportunities where you do not have to pay to join and yet you can earn a commission from referring others.  In other words, the free ones.

When people have less and less money to spend, this means it gets harder and harder to sell products.  People don’t buy what they don’t feel they can afford.  This also means it’s going to be more difficult to recruit people into those network marketing opportunities where you have to pay monthly to be involved.

And yet people need ways to make money more than they ever did.  They’re just going to be more gun shy about paying for the privilege.

If you have a free but lucrative opportunity people can join, I don’t think you will need to try too hard to get referrals.  If the opportunity looks legit, people will be ok with registering for it just to see where it goes.  They won’t be as willing to try it out if they have to pay.

It is becoming my opinion that to succeed today, you need to have at least one or two good free opportunities to promote along with all the affiliate products you are selling.  This is going to be especially true in the make money online niche.

People searching for ways to make money online today want the free ways.  They have time but no money.  You are going to miss out on the earning potential they provide unless you offer them a way to make money for free.

Here are a few excellent ways to make money online for free that you can promote not only to your friends but also in your Internet marketing efforts.

1.  Varolo You’ve seen the banner ads and I’ve already written several articles about it.  This is the free opportunity where you opt in to watch television commercials in exchange for points and jackpot entries (Varolo will hold its first drawing February 13!), and you earn cash on the ads your referrals watch.  You can also earn residual commissions when you refer advertisers.  The earning potential is unlimited but it will take a lot of referrals to get there.

2.  The Customer Advantage This company opened up for its beta run just two months before Varolo did.  The simple but beautiful premise is that business owners can no longer afford to spend thousands of dollars on antiquated marketing techniques that no longer work.  Instead they need to spend those dollars on offering irresistible discounts that people will want to tell their friends about (and post on Twitter and Facebook and so on).  When you join you receive notices of when local businesses in your area are offering deep discounts and you get to save money when you take advantage of those deals.

When the people you refer (down to potentially five levels) spend money on the deals, you earn 5% of what they spend.  The best part is that not only is it 100% free to join, it’s also 100% free to advertise on.  If you own a business, you can easily and freely offer a deep discount and increase your exposure by doing so.  And when you refer your customers (so they can learn of your great deals) you will earn a commission wherever they happen to shop!

You don’t have to own a business to refer people and start earning when they take advantage of the deals.  Join The Customer Advantage today!

3.  Big Crumbs This is where you earn cash back when you shop at recognized online retailers such as Ebay, Gap, and other big names.  You also earn commissions when your referrals shop at those places by first logging into their Big Crumbs accounts.  You earn on single level referrals so in this way it works more like a traditional affiliate sale, except it’s free to join and you will earn every time one of your referrals makes a purchase through Big Crumbs, so there is the potential to earn residual income, which is what everyone wants these days.

When you offer these programs and people join them through your link, you have the potential to earn money over and over from those people’s actions.  Not only that, you have just given them a way to both save money and earn money by turning around and getting referrals of their own.

If you also provide them with a bit of help to actually succeed in any of these opportunities, guess what?  Not only will they trust you and be happy to buy from you when you do have a product to sell, but they will actually have the means with which to do so!

No matter what type of network or Internet marketing you do, be sure to include these free opportunities among your offerings.  You will then have a way to earn money even from those who will not buy anything but who are looking for free but lucrative opportunities.

Anyone who is serious about Internet marketing will eventually begin building an opt-in list of email subscribers.  You know what they say, the money is in the list.

When you have a website without a list, you more or less get one shot at converting your visitors into buyers.  In my training emails I encourage you to make sure you include products that are priced right for one shot impulse buying so that you can reach those visitors the first time.

When you do start building an email list, you then have the opportunity to reach your visitors repeatedly.  This will allow you to introduce them to a higher priced product and mention the same product in more than one email message.  In this way, your readers get the necessary several exposures to the same product which will make them more willing to buy it.

With that said, I think developing an actual relationship with your subscribers–the kind of relationship that leads to trust where they will buy a product you recommend because they trust your opinion–is a lot more difficult than it used to be.

Once word got out that the money is in the list, everyone now has an opt-in list.  Not only that, everyone dangles some sort of free electronic trinket in front of you enticing you to subscribe.  In fact, there are now entire giveaway events where everyone can subscribe to everyone else’s list in exchange for the free trinkets.

The result is that you have to assume that any subscribers to your list are probably also subscribed to at least ten others.  You also have to realize that the only reason they subscribed to your list is because they wanted to have the freebie.  This is definitely true in the online marketing industry.

The money is in the list, but only if your subscribers actually read your emails.

If you want your subscribers to read your emails, then your emails need to provide unmistakeable value to them.

Quite frankly, I am sick of people emailing me every day to tell me about yet another great product I can buy that will make me rich.  In fact, I really don’t like knowing that the list owners view me and all the other subscribers as some sort of money machine.  Hey, I need an extra $10,000.  Time to blast my list.  How do you like being a small cog in someone’s cash cow?

I believe my series of messages needs to be much more than one product recommendation after another.

If you visit this website and subscribe to my email list it’s because you want to learn more about Internet marketing.  You very likely want to learn the skills you need to become a successful Internet marketer yourself.

This is why I have structured my email messages to provide you with training in these basic skills.  When you read and take action on my emails, you move closer to becoming a successful Internet marketer.  This is the value I want to bring you through my emails.

By the time you complete my autoresponder follow up sequence (which I’m still working on), I want you to have at least one Internet marketing campaign up and running and I want you to be making some money with it.  In other words, I want my emails to change your life for the better.

Of course, that will only happen if you read them.  My point is that while I will recommend you make some purchases from time to time, especially where the product has made a huge difference to me, I see no reason (other than lining my own pockets) to blast you with product after product and hope you buy all of them but wind up with so many that you don’t know what to do.

I don’t care how good the product is, no one is going to get rich by trying to implement three new systems a week.  You have to choose your campaign and stick with it.  You have to pick your products to sell, and then you have to work at selling them.  Tons of new product recommendations will only distract you.  I don’t want to distract you.  I want you to succeed.

As you start thinking about building your own list, think about what it is you want to accomplish through your messages.  How do you want to help your readers improve their lives?  What do you want to teach them?  What do you want them to do with your messages?  Put yourself in their shoes.  What kind of emails would you look forward to reading every day?