How to market your home business online for free

I admit it. The term "viral marketing" is offensive. Call yourself a Viral Marketer and people will take two steps back. I would. "Do they have a vaccine for that yet?" you wonder. A sinister thing, the simple virus is fraught with doom, not quite dead yet not fully alive, it exists in that nether genre somewhere between disaster movies and horror flicks.

But you have to admire the virus. He has a way of living in secrecy until he is so numerous that he wins by sheer weight of numbers. He piggybacks on other hosts and uses their resources to increase his tribe. And in the right environment, he grows exponentially. A virus don't even have to mate -- he just replicates, again and again with geometrically increasing power, doubling with each iteration:

1
11
1111
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1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

In a few short generations, a virus population can explode.

Viral Marketing Defined
What does a virus have to do with marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as "word-of-mouth," "creating a buzz," "leveraging the media," "network marketing." But on the Internet, for better or worse, it's called "viral marketing." While others smarter than I have attempted to rename it, to somehow domesticate and tame it, I won't try. The term "viral marketing" has stuck.

The Classic Hotmail.com Example
The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:

Give away free e-mail addresses and services,
Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com" and,
Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates,
Who see the message,
Sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then
Propel the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.
Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy
Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:

Gives away products or services
Provides for effortless transfer to others
Scales easily from small to very large
Exploits common motivations and behaviors
Utilizes existing communication networks
Takes advantage of others' resources
Let's examine at each of these elements briefly.

1. Gives away valuable products or services
"Free" is the most powerful word in a marketer's vocabulary. Most viral marketing programs give away valuable products or services to attract attention. Free e-mail services, free information, free "cool" buttons, free software programs that perform powerful functions but not as much as you get in the "pro" version. Wilson's Second Law of Web Marketing is "The Law of Giving and Selling" (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmta/basic-principles.htm). "Cheap" or "inexpensive" may generate a wave of interest, but "free" will usually do it much faster. Viral marketers practice delayed gratification. They may not profit today, or tomorrow, but if they can generate a groundswell of interest from something free, they know they will profit "soon and for the rest of their lives" (with apologies to "Casablanca"). Patience, my friends. Free attracts eyeballs. Eyeballs then see other desirable things that you are selling, and, presto! you earn money. Eyeballs bring valuable e-mail addresses, advertising revenue, and e-commerce sales opportunities. Give away something, sell something.

2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
Public health nurses offer sage advice at flu season: stay away from people who cough, wash your hands often, and don't touch your eyes, nose, or mouth. Viruses only spread when they're easy to transmit. The medium that carries your marketing message must be easy to transfer and replicate: e-mail, website, graphic, software download. Viral marketing works famously on the Internet because instant communication has become so easy and inexpensive. Digital format make copying simple. From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation. Short is better. The classic is: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com." The message is compelling, compressed, and copied at the bottom of every free e-mail message.

3. Scales easily from small to very large
To spread like wildfire the transmission method must be rapidly scalable from small to very large. The weakness of the Hotmail model is that a free e-mail service requires its own mailservers to transmit the message. If the strategy is wildly successful, mailservers must be added very quickly or the rapid growth will bog down and die. If the virus multiplies only to kill the host before spreading, nothing is accomplished. So long as you have planned ahead of time how you can add mailservers rapidly you're okay. You must build in scalability to your viral model.

4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
Clever viral marketing plans take advantage of common human motivations. What proliferated "Netscape Now" buttons in the early days of the Web? The desire to be cool. Greed drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages. Design a marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission, and you have a winner.

5. Utilizes existing communication networks
Most people are social. Nerdy, basement-dwelling computer science grad students are the exception. Social scientists tell us that each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close network of friends, family, and associates. A person's broader network may consist of scores, hundreds, or thousands of people, depending upon her position in society. A waitress, for example, may communicate regularly with hundreds of customers in a given week. Network marketers have long understood the power of these human networks, both the strong, close networks as well as the weaker networked relationships. People on the Internet develop networks of relationships, too. They collect e-mail addresses and favorite website URLs. Affiliate programs exploit such networks, as do permission e-mail lists. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion.

6. Takes advantage of others' resources
The most creative viral marketing plans use others' resources to get the word out. Affiliate programs, for example, place text or graphic links on others' websites. Authors who give away free articles, seek to position their articles on others' webpages. A news release can be picked up by hundreds of periodicals and form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Now someone else's newsprint or webpage is relaying your marketing message. Someone else's resources are depleted rather than your own.

"Copyright © 2000, 2005, Ralph F. Wilson, E-Mail Marketing and Online Marketing editor, Web Marketing Today. All rights reserved. Permission granted to reprint this article on your website without alteration if you include this copyright statement and leave the hyperlinks live and in place."

Let's look at the various ways to you can make money from home...

MLM:

In MLM Programs you can make a lot of money by building an organization as your primary function.

A Multi level Marketing Organization is not a pyramid scheme. A pyramid is built from the top down and only those in at the very beginning can ever come out on top. And the price of the products or services get every step higher and higher, leaving the people at the bottom broke.

In MLM Marketing everybody starts at the bottom and has an EQUAL opportunity to build a large organization, even larger than his sponsor's organization if he wants. It is based on effort and leadership not on when you joined as in a Pyramid scheme.

MLM Marketing is a solution to the distribution costs of many companies because cut out the channels between the producer and the consumer. And a portion of the large amounts of money saved by the company can be paid to the distributors.

When you SPONSOR someone, you are making a COMMITMENT to TEACH them how to do what you are doing, building a BUSINESS OF THEIR OWN. Sponsoring is what makes a Multi level Marketing business so different an makes it grow.

As your organization grows, you are building toward becoming an INDEPENDENT SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PERSON. You are your OWN BOSS.

If you have no intention of sponsoring, teaching and leading then this business model is not for you.

I have built a large organization of thousands of distributors in my current mlm company and I see many that have no business being in business for themselves. All they want is money. They are not interested in products and they really do not want to lead people.

That leads me to Gifting:

I have to admit I was totally ignorant about Gifting until a couple of months ago. I believed that the only honest and legal way to increase your wealth from home was to be involved in Direct Selling or MLM.

I thought immediately that if there is no product involved that meant the system was a typical pyramid scheme. (Don't get me wrong there are schemes and scams out there that disguise themselves as mlm or gifting programs so you MUST be careful)

In my research of Gifting, I learned that some brilliant people who really do want to live more abundantly and help others do the same found a way to do that legally and ethically. In fact the only reason that many network marketing companies have a product is to make it legal. Most people join an opportunity for income first; products are secondary to them.

By definition, Cash Gifting (also referred to as "Cash Leveraging") is the act of privately or publicly giving another person or entity a declared sum of cash (strictly as a gift) and giving it freely without coercion or consideration.

It doesn't involve network marketing, multi-level marketing, or a business or commercial activity. There are no business transactions, investments and/or securities involved in this activity. There's no business or company name or location and there are no directors, officers, shareholders or principals. Individuals simply support each other in a team concept and help change lives.

It's called a cash gift because that's exactly what it is... a gift of cash.

It's certainly not for everyone and over the years, there have been many opinions and thoughts as to the legitimacy of Cash Gifting as a viable and honest means of generating cash. But at the heart of Cash Gifting is a fundamental principle that's often overlooked and convoluted with greed and the love of money.

This principle is quite simple%u2026

"To help your fellow man (or woman) through giving, and in return be recognized and rewarded for your participation in the giving process."

In many countries it's a custom when a couple gets married that they receive cash wedding gifts from relatives and friends.

It's no surprise that the giving and receiving of gifts can drastically change a person's life, and despite some common misconceptions about Cash Gifting, it still remains the most popular vehicle for financial gain in the World.

In fact, Cash Gifting programs account for nearly 60% of all money generated in the home-based opportunity industry.

Is Cash Gifting Legal?

This is probably the number one question that pops up when people start to see the potential with this kind of activity and it's certainly the first thing that I wanted to know.

In researching this activity, I learned that both American and Canadian citizens have the Constitutional right to gift property, cash and other assets. The U.S. gifting rules are found in the IRS Tax Code, Title 26, Sections 2501-2504 and 2511.

The law states that one or more individuals can give a gift to another individual of up to $12,000 each per calendar year without any tax liability to either the giver or receiver of the gift, because the tax on the gift has already been paid. These gifts are not included in the gross income of the recipient.

I also found that most well organized Cash Gifting programs use a Gifting Statement and Non-Solicitation form, which when signed, are binding agreements between two individuals. These forms are used, it's said, to ensure the longevity of a program.

Now, I'm not here to paint a rosy picture and tell you that ALL Cash Gifting programs are legal. Certainly there are some that are not. Unfortunately, there are "old school" Cash Gifting programs out there that weren't structured properly in order to sustain their efforts for any considerable length of time, and some of them use an illegal pyramidal type of structure. Consequently, copy cat programs in the past were closed because of this illegal structure and gave Cash Gifting a bad reputation.

However, in recent years, with the creation and development of the linear "1Up" structure, things have changed and more and more people are benefiting through the use of these types of programs than with any other Cash Gifting structure in the World.

With a 1Up type of Cash Gifting program, there are no fancy sounding "positions" to sell, no "matrix" to fill, and there's no ever-widening base to the structure (In a typical illegal pyramid, only those at the top profit while those at the bottom never reach the top and invariably lose their money).

How does Cash Gifting compare to other home-based opportunities?

After personally coaching and mentoring hundreds and hundreds of people in the home-based opportunity arena, I realized that people don't join a home-based business to peddle lotions, pills, diet cookies, "magic juice", downloadable e-books, over-priced conference tickets, fiddly software bundles, vacation discount vouchers - or any other baloney.

If we really want to take an honest look at the industry, 95% of the people currently in a home business are fooling themselves into THINKING THEY'RE ENTREPRENEURS.

The reality is that they're NOT looking to be IN business at all. They just want another ATM card to put in their wallet or purse! And they want that ATM card to handle all the little extras they need. They don't care about the business of HOW...

THEY JUST WANT MONEY!

Cash Gifting seems to have mass appeal to just about everyone no matter where you live in the world and seems to also have a higher conversion overall compared to other home-based programs.

You probably know this already, but it's worth repeating. Cash Gifting is NOT a "free-to-join" program and that there's a financial cost associated with participating in these types of programs.

The other thing to keep in mind is that most Cash Gifting programs only allow you to receive gifts at the level at which you pledge at. In other words, enroll at $500, only receive $500. Enroll at $1500, only receive $1500 and so on.

Should someone enroll at $3,500 and you're on the $500 level, the difference between the levels ($3000) rolls past you to the next person who is on that level and qualified.

After all of the my research, I have found the best system is...

The Overnight Cash System (TOCS)
Review: As an internet-based cash gifting activity, TOCS is the "baby" of online cash gifting programs since it's only been around for a little over 2 years, but it's gaining in popularity. It uses a 1Up style structure like the others and offers members one of the most professional and hands-off systems out there. There are 5 levels or "tiers" in TOCS: $500, $1,000, $2,500, $5,000, and $10,000. Interested prospects visit the website to read all about the program, listen to the audio recordings, read the testimonies, watch the movies, then they can call in toll-free or submit a Callback Request and get all their questions answered by experienced team leaders. In other words, members never need to speak to any prospects or answer any questions. There are additional fees required to become a TOCS member. These fees are determined by which Tier Level you choose to get started with and range from $200 to $1,000. There's also a monthly fee of $29.95 for the hosting of the replicated websites as well as access to all the marketing tools. They give a discount if you purchase a one year subscription up front. Just to be clear, the fees I just mentioned are in addition to the initial cash gift that's sent to the sponsor.

The Pros: With the lowest entry level being only $500, it's accessible to the masses. The system is highly automated and members are provided with tons of marketing tools including a turn-key postcard campaign that goes out via direct mail and sends prospects to your personally replicated website. They also have their own lead program through Cutting Edge Media that directs targeted real-time leads to your website. The founder of the system is constantly tweaking and fine tuning the system to ensure it stays n the cutting-edge of what's working and converting. TOCS is a great for beginners. Check it out: www.automaticgifter.com