For those who don’t know, network marketing is the business model in which independent representatives (sometimes called distributors) are the primary method for a company to market products. Think of Pampered Chef, Amway, Avon, Discovery Toys, etc. How did you hear about those products? Probably not from a Super Bowl commercial, but instead from a friend or family who is trying to sell them.

The Business Model

The business model runs off the extremely successful theory that the best type of marketing is word of mouth, or endorsement marketing. It has been around for decades and will be around for a long time to come. The commission structure is different for every company, but usually it is a multi-tiered commission structure.

For example, if I sign up under my sponsor, Person A, for every sale I make, not only do I get paid, but my sponsor (Person A) gets paid a small portion as well. If I sign up you, my reader (Person B), every sale you make will pay me a commission, and for some companies will also pay my sponsor, Person A, a commission as well. Terms such as upline, downline, "team", roll-up, one-up, two-up, residuals, and many more are used to describe the payment structure.

Network Marketing vs. MLM

Multi-level Marketing, or MLM, is a type of company that has multiple levels of commissions. Like the example above, if you, Person B, makes a sale, I get a commission, my sponsor (Person A) gets a commission, his sponsor gets a commission, and so on. For your first sale, everyone gets a commission except, well, you, the person who made a sale. Some companies (called 2-ups) even have the policy that you won’t get paid until after your first TWO sales.

MLM has had a very checkered past and does not enjoy the best of reputations. They have been hit pretty hard by the FTC and rightfully so. It is illegal (in the US) to require someone to join a program in order to sell it. For instance, it is illegal for the a company like the Global Resorts Network (GRN) to make you buy one of their vacation packages before you can sell it. This law came about when people were joining Amway, buying thousands of dollars of stuff in order to be able to sell it, and would go bankrupt because they couldn’t sell it.

The way current MLM companies get away with this type of practice is requiring what they call "qualifying sales". If you do not buy the product or service, the MLM company segregates you from the rest of the distributors who did, and requires you to make even more sales before you start receiving your commissions. It is not uncommon to have to make 5, 6, or even 10 sales before you get paid for your first sale. Even worse, all the people who sign up as distributors will be signed up under your sponsor instead of you, potentially costing you thousands of dollars.

As you can see, this is shady at best. Because of these practices, the MLM industry has gotten a bad name. It is so bad, in fact, that my best advertising ads included the phrase "NOT MLM!"

So the term "Network marketing" was born. Sometimes it is synonomous with MLM, sometimes it means something completely different, but the concept is the same. The MLM business model is slowly dying away but is being replaced with the direct sales model, in which you get paid, from day 1, for every sale you make. In addition, your sponsor will get paid, and that’s it.

The Stigma and How They Get You to Join

Quickly (maybe it’s obvious), I found out that the best people to join your "team" are those who want to start a business and market the product themselves, not someone who wants to buy the product just for the product. This way, you can take advantage of the residual income they make for you by selling the product (no advertising cost for me). I’m sure you’ve heard the pitch: what if, you were to get 5 people to join, and they got 5 people, and they got 5 people. It’d be easy to make millions! (in truth, you may get 5 people to join, but any one of those 5 people may get a total of 3 people, only 1 of which will actually make commissions for you, and it goes on from there)

So for you relatively advanced marketers, it should be obvious that the ideal persona for these companies is a business opportunity seeker with enough cash to spend a significant amount of money on advertising. In fact, the best chance to get someone in your downline is by recruiting them from another company. MLM is extremely incestuous, with the top earners usually coming off a bad experience with another company.

Herein lies the first fundamental problem of running a network marketing/MLM business online. I’ll discuss that in a second, but first I want to get into the basics of who profits from MLM companies.

Who Profits, and How Many Fail?

It should be obvious that the people who profit the most in an MLM company are those who are at the top. Who is higher than the original founders of the company? There are a few sporadic cases of extreme success sprinkled throughout the organization, but by and far the most successful people are the ones who "got in at the ground floor".

The reason behind this is one that not many people see right-off-the-bat. I’ll put it in another light.

What if I, right here and now, revealed that I was making about $100,000 a month in the croquet niche? Then I went on to say that the way I made this money was by selling croquet balls, and I told you who my manufacturer was, what my keywords were in Adwords that I was advertising on, where I placed my banner ads, etc. all for the low price of $39.99. Then I went on to say that you, too can get into the croquet niche, sell the same balls, and make the same amount of money? What would you do? Would you go out and start your own croquet site using all my information? Maybe some of you wouldn’t, but most of you would.

What just happened? I became rich selling croquet balls. Then, I got rich again, selling information on how to sell croquet balls. What else did I just do? I made it a million times harder to sell those croquet balls because my competition just went from 0 or very low to extremely high. The same thing happens over the lifetime of a MLM or network marketing company. As the number of distributors increase, so does competition.

Besides, what USP are they going to have? They haven’t been successful yet, so they can’t talk about that. If you couple this with the fact that most people who start a network marketing business do not have much experience in marketing and have very little time and money to devote to success, you get a failure rate of 98%.

Seriously, a failure rate of 98%

What I personally started to see is that as soon as the company started getting very popular, the top distributors in the company started accepting the fact that they would break even, or even lose money their first sale.

In my company, this was a $2,000 product that we were breaking even on!!

How can you possibly expect a new distributor to get started if they 1) have to pay for a $2,000 product, 2) don’t make money on any of their follow-on sales and instead make money from their residual check.

If you’re a numbers person, here are the graphs from the Direct Sales Association, the guys who want to legalize pyramid schemes:

Keep in mind, these are THEIR number, and they are estimates. (they’re still not good)…

US Sales (Worldwide is worse):

US Sales FORCE…

 From this data, this is what I have determined. Amount of sales, per person, per year (in dollars):

Now here’s the sick part. Amount of yearly sales, per person, after adjusted for inflation:

WOW! Not a very good trend, huh? Would you invest in a company with trends like this? Not only that, but the average person only sells about $2117 a year in the US and $1866 a year worldwide! That’s about $176 a month. And here’s the kicker: commission is usually around 10-20%, so that’s what, $17 a month? What kind of business is that? Do you think that offsets the fact that they had to buy hundreds of dollars of equipment to get started? Absolutely not. The numbers do not lie, folks.

They’re all Liars

So what drives so many people to network marketing? The money. There seriously is a lot of money to be made if you are successful, and the people who make the millions shine very brightly and attract a lot of distributors.

How do the new distributors attract other distributors when they don’t have a great success story? When a prospect calls and says "how much money have you made so far", how do they say, "Well, actually, I haven’t made any money, but I’m sure I will soon."

It’s simple… they lie.

I did it. Everyone under me did it. Everyone above me did it. I didn’t tell them over the phone that I was successful, but I did on my landing page. I joined a marketing company called Carbon Copy Pro. The landing page says "A Realistic $250k First Year Income". It tells the story of Jay Kubassek and how successful he was with this exact same marketing system.

I bet 80-90% of the people who opted into my system thought I was Jay Kubassek. They had no idea who I was until they bought from Jay me.

The Present and Future State of Network Marketing, Particularly Online

Network Marketing and MLM are here to stay. If you don’t think so, just google the term "business opportunity" and see what ads pop up. Advertising, however, is to the point where it is too expensive to compete unless you can make a significant amount of money on each sale. The companies where you make $5 or $12 a sale will not be able to advertise on any sort of bid-based medium (which most ad platforms are now)

The success rate will stay the same – around 2% – because most who join do not have the deep pockets or heavy time commitment required to participate in Web 2.0, pay-per-click, or banner advertising. That’s the statistics I saw in my business and that’s what I believe it will be.

Even though there are successes in this industry, I DO NOT recommend getting started in it. If its purely for the money, there are plenty of other ways to make just as much money online with a much higher success rate and in a much more honorable way.

I personally am quitting the company I’m in because I cannot market something that claims to be able to transform anyone into millionaires overnight and doesn’t deliver. After 9 months, I felt sleezier than ever before when I started to find out that the honeymoon may be over for my company. I would much rather focus on my guilt-free businesses.

My father is a relatively successful entrepreneur and my mother is a piano teacher. Even though they accomplished a lot,  unfortunately, they’re not very good at saving money. After 40 years of working, they have about $10k saved to their name, and a retirement plan (not including social security) that will pay them out about $700 a month after they retire in 3 years. Not if I have anything to do about it.

The truth is, I’ll end up paying for their retirement. I don’t mind. They took care of me for 18 years, so now it’s my turn. I have enough money set aside that they can live off the interest for the rest of their lives.

That’s not enough, though. I want to give them a huge "happy retirement" present. What better present than to buy them a waterfront house on an Adirondack Lake? Unfortunately, I don’t have the $550k to buy the property and the $300k to buy the house. Yet. However, they’re retiring in 3 years. Here’s how I’ll make $850k in 3 years and how you can, too.

First off, you need to set a goal. Obviously mine is set; $850k in 3 years. Now we need to break it down into smaller goals.

Well, an online business usually sells for 12-14 months net profit and if it has potential all the way up to 24 months. This means that with 3 years, I would have to make ($850k/4=) $215k a year in online profits. ($215k x 3 years + 1 more year for selling the business). Can I make $215k a year online? Seems like a lot, doesn’t it?

Take that $215k a year and divide it into months. $18k a month, roughly. Do you think you can make $18k a month? That also seems like a lot, doesn’t it?

How much is one visitor worth in your business? $1? $2? $0.10? Let’s say one visitor to your site is worth about $0.50, a conservative estimate. That means in order to make $850k in 3 years, I’ll need to get 36,000 visitors a month to my site. Does this sound more achievable? It still sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?

How about if I started about 7 websites and marketed every single one of them the correct way? 36,000/7 = 5,200 visitors month. Hmmm… doesn’t seem so bad now. What if I started 10 websites? Do you think you can start 10 websites in 3 years and market them to the point where they get 3,600 visitors a month?

That’s only 120 visitors a day!  Between all of the traffic methods you know already, do you think you can get 120 visitors a day?

This blog already gets twice that amount and it’s only 4 months old! Do you think you can create a blog like this 10 times in the next 3 years (every 3 months)? Doesn’t seem so hard now, doesn’t it?

So what did we just do? We just found out a way to pay for an $850,000 waterfront lakehouse with cash just by being successful entrepreneurs. We broke down our goals into smaller pieces that actually became achievable.

The next step, of course, is to take the next step and put this plan into action. One….step… at… a… time…

I know some of you may have objections and think this is not achievable. What are they?

I’m subscribed to my competitor’s email lists, as you should be too. You will gain great insight into a niche, get great free content, and even better, know exactly who to contact when it comes time to JV with them when you launch a new product.

So out comes this message from my #1 competitor stating he has something big coming up. Then he goes on to explain what the new product will entail and to watch out for it on Tuesday. Wouldn’t you know, the description matched my product concept, almost word-for-word.

What was going to be a decent, $20-30k a month product that was rediculously easy to create and market because there is no direct competition will now require me to find a better USP, charge less, have a few less JV partners (because he has already partnered with a few others), etc.

The worst part? In my short list of maybe 15 different JV partner possibilities, I’m absolutely positive that at least 7-10 of them were going to accept a JV with me because my product was different enough from theirs that I could easily convince them to help me launch this product. Now I’m probably down to 3-4 at most.

Instead of being able to say, "it’s the only one of its kind online", my USP now has to be something like "it’s the least expensive of its kind, or best of its kind or has the most features" or something along those lines.

That is how business goes. I could just as easily switch directions and scrap this product. Instead, I am just going to make it much better and be able to market it better.

That, IMHO, is the difference between the super successful and the semi-successful. Adapt, Improvise, and Overcome.

What do you think?

The San Francisco was travelling through the Western Pacific in order to transit from one point to another, sort of like you would travel an interstate to get from one city to another. They were travelling at extremely fast speeds. The area they were travelling through was very mountainous, as is most of the Pacific Ocean, but they were never operating outside of the operating capabilities of the submarine. So how could the have avoided a mountain that is literally invisible?

They certainly weren’t the first submarine to go through the area, and they definitely will not be the last. Why didn’t the other submarines hit the invisible mountain? Because the other submarines followed a path that had already proven safe by submarines before it.

You see, the San Francisco had chosen to cut a corner when travelling. They were a little bit behind schedule, and they decided to deviate from the proven path that previous submarines had followed when transiting through the area. The area was perfectly safe, and all submarines are allowed to create their own path if they would like to, provided it is safe. If the San Francisco had used the same path that was tried and proven, they would never have run into that mountain, and that crew would be perfectly fine.

How could you use this in your business? Simple: use paths that are tried and proven. Get started in niches that you know for sure are profitable because people are already making money in them. Don’t try some kind of crazy traffic "secrets" that you think may work. Use the same tried and true methods that everyone else uses.

Don’t stray far from the path. You’ll eventually hit that underwater mountain.

I will make the disclaimer that the two products I link to, Terry Dean’s List Building product and Brian and Tony Clark’s Teaching Sells, have both made me lots of money and they are two of the best products I can recommend.

I am working on something to give to you for free, though. Something that I get a lot of questions about:

Traffic.

John Reese is going to re-release his Traffic Secrets course. Let me ask you this: what do you think is his "secret"? There is no secret. It’s pretty simple, and the ways to generate traffic, I guarantee you already know about. I’m going to write them down and explain in general terms how each one works, and then in the blog I’ll expand. If you think it’s incredibly hard to get over a million visitors a month, after you read this book I’m going to write, you’ll ask yourself, "that’s it?"

I would like you to realize what John Reese is doing: it’s taught in Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula, and they even talk about this specific tactic: he just released a "spy" photo of his product, Traffic Secrets 2.0. Even though it’s months away from being released, he’s starting to generate buzz.

Then he goes on and talks about the box, how pretty it is and it was specifically designed to help you return it if you need to. What does that sound like? A USP (Unique Selling Proposition), maybe? It’s also a reason to release the photo to generate buzz. He can’t just say "I released this picture of the box because I want to generate buzz so more people will buy this overpriced product", can he? Nope, instead he has a reason for the photo.

What other reasons does he have to come up with?

• The reason for scarcity when it comes time to launch the product, like he’s only going to sell 1,000 products, or at midnight he’ll shut the doors forever and you’ll never get a chance to buy the product again, or perhaps he’ll have some dumb bonus that will only be included for the first 50 purchases.
• The reason for relaunching the product. Can anyone say "my server crashed?"
• The difference between Traffic Secrets 1.0 and 2.0 and why those who bought 1.0 need 2.0

You see, launching a product is really standard. Once you do it yourself, you can spot the tactics a mile away, and they’re the same story over and over. That’s because it works, and works extremely well. You should think about incorporating this into everything you sell.

Ohh, and I just bought a new house My wife and I are very happy.

1. He generated most of his traffic through Entrecard.com.

   His most linked-to post was announcing the party in which he was supposed to surpass the 50,000 rank in Alexa. That never happened because Alexa changed their algorithm from bad to bad, but the party went on anyway. He received 1,003 links for that post, which is over 10 times as many as his second most popular post, Back Again, which only had 96 links, and even that was actually about his most popular post, the party.

   What does that tell you? He used a Web 2.0 technology to generate most of his traffic, and he used it correctly. He didn’t just bookmark every one of his posts on Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumble, Reddit, etc. and go along his merry way. He picked one social networking site and absolutely dominated it. He interacted nicely with the other community members, made friends, and leveraged those friendships to 1) generate traffic and authority and 2) help him pull together the party mentioned above which was a huge contributor to his success. I have always seen social networks as relationship builders, instead of spamming them, and strongly recommend you do the same. Pick a social network, make friendships and contribute to the community, and those friendships and partnerships will help you carry your business.
    

2. He outsources all of his menial and monotonous tasks, and recommends you do the same.

   So do I. It’s Plain and simple. There are way too many things you need to do in order to be successful as a blogger and businessperson to try to do them all by yourself. What will it take for you to start outsourcing? Sure, your first outsourced task may not be 100% profitable and successful, but that’s why you refine them until they are. With unskilled labor so cheap and at your fingertips, you really can’t afford not to outsource most, if not all, of your tasks.

   As I said in my last post, I will never outsource my blog posts, but that’s a personal decision. Marcus recommends hiring a ghostwriter if you’re not good at writing, and that is fine. But I say give it a shot. Blogging is not all that hard, and you’ll only get better if you keep doing it. I personally write my own blog posts because I love doing them. The things I don’t love doing that take up my time, I’m outsourcing. Don’t just blindly outsource, though. If you have been outsourcing something for a few months and you just can’t turn a profit from it, drop it altogether. It’s not worth doing by you nor someone else.
    

3. Hang around and learn from successful people.
   
   This is a mindset thing. If you aren’t doing it now, you should start. It’s plain and simple. It’s been proven thousands of times over again, and hundreds of books have been written about how success begets success. 

   This is my personal weakness. I love hanging around my friends that are stuck in their 9-5 job forever, and they’re great friends. I do, however, know that if I hang around them too much, I get sucked into their "watch 40 hours of football" mentality. That is just not me. I’m working on this. I don’t want to ditch them because they’re my lifelong friends, but they can’t keep sucking the success out of me. I’ve even tried to teach them how to make money online, but they wanted nothing to do with it, even after they saw how much I made myself.
    

4. Build a list and create your own products
   
   What will it take for me to convince you to build your own products? If you’re already blogging or are in a niche, I guarantee you can make your own products. Let’s look at Marcus’s: 2 interviews and 4 DVDs. How long does it take to make a DVD? That depends, but it should take no more than a couple of days with research included. It helps if you have at least a little bit of knowledge of the information you’re teaching, but it’s not required. Don’t think you can make a good DVD? Call up someone successful and interview them. Don’t think you can do that? Then outsource it! See above paragraph for information on how to do that.

What can Marcus do, in my opinion, to double his profits?

It’s just one simple suggestion, but this has lead to between 40 and 70% of my sales, depending on which market and niche you’re talking about: release the power of the affiliate (or JV)!

Marcus should host his products on a separate domain and use something like 1shoppingcart.com to track affiliate referrals. Or perhaps slap up a sales letter and put it on Clickbank. It’s something to look at with regards to growing his business, considering he has outsourced a lot of his tasks already. He can leverage his popularity in the Entrecard community to help him sell his products. That’s really my only suggestion.

In all… congratulations, Marcus. Your stats are nothing short of phenomenal.

My mom knows nothing about business. She has taught piano lessons for the last 20 years to neighborhood kids, and she’s pretty much a typical Italian mom

We have a different type of relationship. She is an extrovert, and is always striking up conversations with other people she doesn’t even know. I am a natural introvert, which has served me well, especially in the Navy when I couldn’t talk about 90% of what I did. It also probably helped in my decision to start doing business online, as well, since you never have to talk to people you don’t even know, or so I had thought.

I honestly don’t think I learned all the much from my mom, but I did learn one thing that I can point to as playing a huge part in my success as a businessman:

It’s not about what you know, but who you know.

In my neverending quest to automate everything I possibly can, there are some things I will never outsource or automate, no matter how busy I get (and recommend you do the same):

1. Blog posts – You, as my reader, deserve more than a hired freelancer or "intern" who writes my posts for me. I have a lot of experience in internet marketing and making money online that I am not sure a freelancer could ever convey
2. Blog comments – If you see a comment with my name, Bryan Reed, on it, I wrote it. That is my contribution to that blog.
3. Joint Venture relationships – Any one of my joint venture partners have direct access to my personal cell phone, email address, and snail mail address.

That’s it. Everything else is either automated, outsourced, or will eventually be automated or outsourced. Those three never will be. Why don’t I hire blog ghostwriters, outsource blog comments, or hire an affiliate/joint venture manager? Simple: it’s what my mom taught me: it’s not about what you know, but about who you know. Without relationships on the web, we would there would be no web.

This is a fundamental aspect of business that I wrote about (among other things) in my book, which I just released. If you would like a copy, it’ll cost you a subscription to my blog updates. It’s a 28 page, single spaced, all-meat-and-no-fat ebook that gives a step-by-step overview on how to start an internet business. I have used this as a guide to successfully start every one of my businesses online, and don’t plan on stopping.

I challenge you to always be thinking about how you can be improving your relationship with your customers/clients/readers by helping them and doing something for them. Like I said, my mom taught me that, and I think it’s the single most valuable piece of business advice I could ever give.

Storytime Sunday

I am going to make this a regular occurrence. Every Sunday, I will post a lesson I’ve learned through a hopefully entertaining story. Sometimes the stories will be mine, sometimes they will be other’s. Every time they will be an allegory.

The Itch to Change

Last May, I decided I was going to run a marathon. Just like that. I woke up and said, I’m tired of being lazy. I need to run a marathon. I wanted to set a goal I wasn’t entirely sure was possible and try to achieve that goal.

So I found a marathon training schedule online and started that Monday. I was ready to go!! Monday rolled around and I started by running 3 miles. I have always been able to run 3 miles, so it wasn’t all that hard. "I have this thing in the bag", I thought.

My first long run came along on Saturday. 6 miles. That was tough, but I pushed through it. I was starting to get discouraged. Maybe this wasn’t as easy as I thought.

Just Not Driven Enough

Monday came along and I was busy that day! I didn’t have time to run the 3 miles, so I skipped it. I’ll make it up later in the week, besides, I can run 3 miles with no problem, I thought.

I ran 4 miles that Thursday, but that was it I was supposed to run 3 on Monday, 4 on Wednesday, and 3 on Friday. Saturday rolled around and I was supposed to run 7 miles. I skipped it because I was busy, and planned on doing it Sunday. Sunday came and I ran. I got about 4.5 miles into it and had to stop. I walked back to my house and quit the program. If I couldn’t run 4.5 miles, there is absolutely no way I can run 26.2.

My Own Mastermind Group, and Making the Commitment

Two weeks later, I started talking to my brother-in-law. He told me he wanted to run the same marathon that I did. He also had never run a marathon before, but really wanted to try one. I decided I would give it one more shot. This time, I signed up for the marathon and paid the non-refundable entrance fee.

I started the training program again. This time, I decided that it would be a priority in my life and put it before everything else. No more excuses. If it meant I ran at 1 AM, that’s what I would do.

Begin with the End in Mind and Baby Steps

It was tough; I’m not going to lie. When you start training in June for something in October, it is really hard to see the end goal. When you get winded and almost have to stop running after 5 miles, it is really hard to think that you’ll be able to run 26.2 miles.

I followed through, though! By the end of September, the furthest I ran was 20 miles! My brother-in-law had run 23 miles. The race was quickly approaching. Every piece of literature I had read said not to run the full marathon before the actual race. They said 20 miles was enough, and so I ran 20 miles. Hell, I could squeeze out those last 6.2 miles, no problem. I was running 6.2 miles before breakfast on Wednesdays.

Race day came. I was excited and nervous. The race started and off I went! My three goals were to a) Finish the race, b) Not die, and c) Finish in under 4 hours.

My first half was a stellar one. In order to finish in exactly 4 hours, I had to run a 9 minute and 9 second mile pace. My pace for the first half of the race was 8 minutes and 30 seconds. AWESOME! I could slow up if I had to, even down to 9:45 mile pace and still beat 4 hours. I was feeling great.

A Rocky Road, but Don’t Quit, no Matter What

Then came mile 18. I was starting to get very very tired. My pace had dropped off to a 9 minute and 15 second mile. Not horrible, and I could still make the 4 hour mark easily, but I was seriously running out of steam. Only 8 more miles to go.

Mile 20 was where I started having the real trouble. I had to start walking. My pace fell of dramatically. I was now down to a 10:15 pace. I might be able to make the 4 hour mark.

Nothing Prepared Me Better for Running a Marathon than Running a Marathon

Mile 23 was where my body just quit on me. I had to walk more than I ran. The last 3 miles were somewhat uphill, and my pace fell off to about a 11:00 pace. I didn’t understand it. How could this be? I trained just as the program had told me.

I finished at 4:09. I missed the 4 hour mark by 9 minutes. It doesn’t sound like much, but 9 minutes is a lot considering I could barely make it across the finish line.

The Consolation Prize: A Much Better Life

I had met 2 of my 3 goals, (the most important 2 of course). I was absolutely drained after the race. But looking back, the week or 2 after the race, I had never felt so good in my life. I was in great shape and I had more energy during the day than I ever had before. I looked great, felt great, had more patience, more energy, stamina, drive, self-pride, happiness, and fulfillment than before I started.

Even though I didn’t finish in the time I wanted, I finished. And my life was 100 times better because of it.

Enjoy.

Believe it or not, when it comes to offline businesses, search engine traffic is not the primary benefit. More importantly, the main benefit you gain from blogging is the trust you build with your client.

For instance, before the blogging boom, it was nearly impossible for someone unconnected to talk to the CEO of one of the largest software companies in the world. Now, all you have to do is follow a link to his blog and leave a comment. That’s it! You can now have a conversation with an extremely influential person in the tech world. Go ahead, tell him how much you like Open Office, or Java!

Maintaining a personal relationship, even if it is just a perceived one, makes the customer or client feel as if they were in the mom and pop store of yesteryear. Follow the link above and look at Jonathon’s blog. Notice how he calls it Jonathon Schwartz’s blog, not the Sun blog. All of his posts are conversational in nature and keep the reader informed. It really feels like he was sitting across the dinner table and you just asked him "How’s business?" In my opinion, you should always strive to maintain that conversational tone that Jonathon imparts, and make your blog reader feel as if they are talking to a friend.

Maintain this tone and impart knowledge on your reader at the same time and you’ll win the hearts and minds of customers everywhere. I do warn you of one word of caution, however. Do not stray too far on the personal end of the spectrum; you will start to lose readers. By imparting your personal views, habits, and beliefs, you will alienate at least a small portion of your customer base and they will be very reluctant to do business with you again.

So in all, maintain a conversational tone, stay away from the extremely personal feelings and actions, and always add value to the internet. Follow these simple rules and you’ll reap the rewards of blogging for business.