LeadGusher Review: Generate MLM leads with RSS?

In MLM, true success is impossible without the generation of leads. Leads provide retail sales and leads provide you an opportunity to expand your business.

Without them, you’re not getting anywhere.

As such, a market has developed around the generation of leads and marketers attempt to come up with new and cutting edge ways for their once fellow marketers to generate leads.

Two such marketers are James Stone and Ralph Martin and today we’re going to take a look at his lead generation system, Lead Gusher.

The Company

Lead Gusher is a MLM lead generation platform created by internet marketers James Stone and  Ralph Martin (respective photos on the right).

Both these two marketers have a history of internet marketing and these days both seem to be claiming to be experts in the field of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

As a result, Lead Gusher attempts to help MLM marketers promote their business via search engine placement, to create what is known as an organic lead (a lead that finds you via your advertising efforts, rather than vice-versa).

Lead Gusher was launched in 2009 and currently claims to be advertising over 9,400 home based business opportunities (although they don’t state whether or not these are unique opportunities or not).

The Lead Gusher Product

Lead Gusher attempts to generate leads for your MLM business by incorporating an autoblog component into a capture page.

For those unfamiliar with the term, an autoblog is a content generation strategy that scrapes the content of other websites and publishes excerpts from the content found, in order to generate ‘new’ content on an existing website.

This scraped content can be directly scraped from the website itself, or via a ‘Really Simple Syndication’ (RSS) feed. A RSS feed is simply a list of updates to a website that can be read and/or scraped for ‘new’ content.

The basic idea is that search engines love new content and these days the reality is a simple capture page with your advertising pitch is probably not going to rank very highly for search engine queries you’re targeting.

With search engines loving updated sites with new content, Lead Gusher attempts to rank your capture pages higher by recycling content from other websites, in an effort to make your capture page appear dynamic and frequently updated.

The Lead Gusher Compensation Plan

The Lead Gusher program is a simple affiliate system wherein you pay $49 to ‘upgrade’ your Lead Gusher membership, and then become eligible to earn a once off commission payout of $22.50 for every new member you sign up to Lead Gusher yourself.

Note that the $22.50 commission is only paid out when members you recruit to Lead Gusher upgrade they themselves (you do not earn any commissions on free signups).

Basic membership to Lead Gusher is free but when you upgrade your membership the company offers you advertising rotation through the company’s own private advertising efforts. Lead Gusher also state that they will personally review your chosen targeted keywords and offer you assistance where they can.

How effective these advertisement rotation efforts are (who and what Lead Gusher are targeting with their advertising efforts is not mentioned) is questionable.

Joining Lead Gusher

Joining Lead Gusher and using the service to promote your own website is free, however if you want to earn a commission for recruiting others to the program you must pay a one time membership fee of $49.

Conclusion

The LeadGusher autoblog promotion system might have worked a few years ago when Lead Gusher launched, but by today’s standards it’s quite an ineffective and dated system.

This year alone Google introduced what is known as the ‘Panda’ update and Panda hit autoblogs hard.

The reason?

They don’t really add anything of unique value themselves to the web.

By syndicating information from a variety of sources, autoblogs do appear to look freshly updated with new content, but if that’s all they do,  they themselves provide little no value to the internet.

Case in point? If an autoblog disappeared, information wise, nothing would actually be lost.

That said, autoblog promotion still has its uses in specific applications but for marketing promotion it’s pretty much dead in the water. Additionally, in relying on autoblogging to boost your search engine position of your capture page, you risk serving up your visitors unrelated content (especially if you target more generic terms) within your autoblog content.

If you wanted to target ‘leads’ for example, unless you were more specific, using autoblog software you might very well wind up with dog leads and all sorts of unrelated content appearing on your site.

In today’s SEO climate, where Google and other search engines value authority unique content driven sites, I’d think very carefully about investing in an autoblogging strategy to promote and generate leads for your MLM business.

As far as the Lead Gusher compensation plan goes, simple maths dictates that two payments of $22.50 covers your $49 buy in and leaves $5 for the company.

For this $5, the only real value you’re possibly going to get is from the going over of your specified targeted keywords by the Lead Gusher team. Other than that, all you’re really doing is covering the just under half of the commission payouts of whoever introduced you.

Then in turn you’ve got to go out and recruit two new people to do the same.

You could argue that the marketing exposure Lead Gusher offers can also contribute to recovering your initial start-up costs but as I mentioned earlier, autoblogging promotion (let alone for the highly competitive MLM and home based business niche) is pretty much dead in the water.

Lastly, as far as the advertising rotation goes offered by Lead Gusher when you upgrade, if they themselves are relying on autoblogging promotion to generate leads, you’re probably going to find this isn’t working too well for them either.

And that pretty much leaves you with just the recruitment commissions to generate an income, rather than off the leads you’re supposed to be generating via Lead Gusher – which initially should be why you signed up to the service in the first place.

If you were intent on using Lead Gusher, personally I’d sign up for the free option and see how the capture page fared (give it a month minimum). If on the off-chance you tap into a niche with low competition and, despite the autoblogging penalties applied today by search engines, manage to rank for your chosen keywords, then it might be worth investing in the upgrade.

If only for the sole reason you’ll be able to actually promote Lead Gusher with a straight face and truthfully claim that it works.

Otherwise, you’re just in it for $22.50 a pop. Not really worth it when you consider the time and effort you’re investing and the fact you should really be focusing on the actual MLM system you’re trying promote.