I have always wanted to be in business for myself. Although I only took the leap in 2006 I had been trying to find a suitable business for many years before that. This search led me into the world of Multi-Level Marketing. I had forgotten about it until recently when I was researching Search Engine Optimisation techniques.
First off, I do not want to criticise multi-level marketing per se as I am sure that there are many people to whom it is a valid and important way to make a living. The trouble with the scheme in which I was involved was that the product did not sell.
The scheme worked so that if you bought £3000 worth of the product, you could become a distributor. This would allow you to recruit other people and you would earn a commission on all their sales. You would also earn smaller commissions on your recruits' recruits and so on all the way down to five levels (making you a 5th Dimension Distributor!). The idea of recruiting other people who then recruited others and earning commission off them sounded much more attractive than going out and selling these products door to door. Therefore my partners and I resolved to concentrate on recruitment rather than sales.
There was one tiny flaw in our plan though. Just about eveyone else in the business had resolved to do exactly the same! So here we had a business where most of the people involved were buying in stock so that they could go on and recruit others. This in turn resulted in hundreds if not thousands of people with this product in their garden sheds. Nobody was buying it for its intended use!
There are many techniques to search engine optimisation and many of them are to do with writing text. Google love good natural text content. The more of it the better and the more interlinked it is the better.
This target has a great benefit to users because it is forcing companies to add as much text ast they can about the products and services that they sell. There is a downside, however.
Many people are writing text just to attract the attention of the search engines. They stuff it with key phrases and try to make it natural but they simply don't care if it is useful or even if it makes sense! Larger scale search optimisers are creating whole websites full of useless content just to attract the attention of Google. They are all linking to each other just to increase page rank and therefore to get you, the searcher, onto their commercial page that sells something to you.
So just like the useless product above, they are creating content not for its own sake and benefit but simply as an avenue to get you to be the buyer.
It is similar with Twitter. Once you set up an account with Twitter you end up with many followers even if your Tweets are personal and/or a little dull. And sometimes you follow them back. In truth, neither of you is following the other, you just want your Twitter ID to appear on as many pages as possible.
In both cases above, the purpose is forgotten because of the profitable results of the side-effect.
I only hope that you found this article interesting and did not think I was just stuffing my site with keywords. I leave it with you as you are the judge!