So you’ve decided to try your hand at network marketing!
Good idea – it’s a great business model and there are a lot of excellent opportunities out there. Let’s face it, everyone could benefit from a side gig!
You sign up and the first thing they offer you is your OWN website.
Sometimes this is free. Sometimes they charge you for it.
“Great,” you think. That just saved me a ton of work.
I don’t have to buy a domain name, organise hosting, set up my own site, write blog posts, learn about SEO or even bother to promote the site.
THINK AGAIN!
The first problem with the ready-made websites that most MLM companies offer their distributors is they all contain the same content.
The EXACT same content.
They are often referred to as ‘cookie cutter’ sites and for obvious reasons!
Google’s Matt Cutts has discussed the topic of duplicate content many times in the past but this new video reiterates the point and is very relevant to MLM marketers.
This is the question that was posed:
What can e-commerce sites do that sell products which have an ingredients list exactly like other e-commerce sites selling the same product to avoid Google as seeing it as duplicate content?
Matt says,
“Let’s consider an ingredients list, which is like food, and you’re listing the ingredients in that food and ingredients like, okay, it’s a product that a lot of affiliates have an affiliate feed for, and you’re just going to display that. If you’re listing something that’s vital, so you’ve got ingredients in food or something like that – specifications that aren’t 18 pages long, but are short specifications, that probably wouldn’t get you into too much of an issue. However, if you just have an affiliate feed, and you have the exact same paragraph or two or three of text that everybody else on the web has, that probably would be more problematic.”
He then continues,
“So what’s the difference between them? Well, hopefully an ingredients list, as you’re describing it as far as the number of components or something is probably relatively small – hopefully you’ve got a different page from all the other affiliates in the world, and hopefully you have some original content – something that distinguishes you from the fly-by-night sites that just say, ‘Okay, here’s a product. I got the feed and I’m gonna put these two paragraphs of text that everybody else has.’ If that’s the only value add you have then you should ask yourself, ‘Why should my site rank higher than all these hundreds of other sites when they have the exact same content as well?’”
“So if some small sub-component of your pages have some essential information that then appears in multiple places, that’s not nearly so bad,”
Matt concludes.
“If the vast majority or all of your content is the same content that appears everywhere else, and there’s nothing else to really distinguish it or to add value, that’s something I would try to avoid if you can.”
But that talks about ingredient lists? How is that relevant to my MLM replicated website?
Think about it!
If every distributor has the EXACT same website that’s a lot of duplicated content.
The keywords from Matt Cutts are ‘original content’.
You can’t have original content if you don’t own the website as most replicated sites don;t allow you to change very much of the content.
Another reason to avoid using your MLM replicated website (should you need one!)
The second reason to avoid using your MLM replicated website is quite simply this.
YOU DON’T OWN IT.
It belongs to the MLM company.
You could spend many hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting your MLM opportunity and collecting valuable leads.
If you use the MLM replicated website to collect email addresses and names they are going on the MLM company’s list and not yours.
You could wake up one morning and find your MLM company has gone out of business and with it your list of prospects.
It has happened and I’m sure it will happen again.
Alternatively you could find yourself in a dispute over something with your MLM and they deny you access to the MLM replicated website and your MLM back office.
Again, your prospect list has disappeared in a puff of smoke!
If you OWN your own website and prospect list, your hard work has not been in vain.
You can pick up and start over at the drop of a hat.
(I know! That’s a pain! But you still have your list and I’m sure you’ve all heard the saying ‘The Money is in the List’)
Imagine how much harder it would be to start over WITHOUT your list!
So always OWN your website and OWN your list!
It’s really not that hard or expensive.
Talk to us today about how you can have your own website and sell your products.
That’s surely a better option than losing everything with your MLM replicated website.
