WMI launches WealthJournals.com… but why?
About a week ago now, Wealth Masters International hired out SEO expert Ryan Nelson as Vice President of ‘Internet Strategy’ and launched a new website campaign ‘wealthjournals.com’.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for those unfamiliar with the concept is the optimisation of a web presence to dominate search engine rankings for particular chosen keywords.
SEO is an entire industry unto itself so I won’t go into further detail, suffice to say that in a business sense, SEO generally refers to manipulating the top search results for your business in your favour.
Naturally that’s the intention of WMI in launching WealthJournals but after browsing the site… surely pages of article fluff isn’t the best way to go about promoting your brand?
WealthJournals has been launched with the intention of ‘assist(ing) WMI Consultants with both online and offline credibility‘.
This falls in line with the purpose of SEO but rather then launch an entirely new website wouldn’t it have made better sense to revamp the already existing ‘WMI Today’ website into a more fully fledged article portal?
The bar WMI have set in launching WelathJournals is quite high, with WMI President Karl Bessey stating that WealthJournals ‘is going to change the way people use SEO‘.
A quick browse around the website however reveals that WealthJournals is nothing more than an attempt to rank for Wealth Masters International by producing what I like to call ‘fluff articles’.
Fluff articles, like this one on the ‘development of the internet’ for example, have little relevancy or value and are instead loosely linked to and used to market something else.
This is done via subtle links leading you back to the business opportunity (in this case WMI) or banner advertising.
They’re even using it to try and bait people looking at alternative business opportunities.
One Wealth Journals fluff piece on Herbal Life starts off quite flattering but then claims WMI’s marketing is better before linking to the WMI business opportunity again at the article’s conclusion.
Your standard ‘you came here looking for information on X, but instead I’m going to try and sell you Y’ SEO marketing tactic. Annoying for your readers and questionably effective.
WealthJournals is full of these types of articles and as such comes off feeling like a directory of articles written by faceless corporate shills, or more accurately probably by Ryan Nelson’s ‘personal SEO team‘.
The thing about SEO is that a lot of it has to be organic. Simply creating a website, calling it your ‘branded SEO program‘ and then stuffing it with articles that link back to WMI business opportunities doesn’t make it so.
The reason?
Well try to think why anyone would stumble across the WealthJournals website.
Sure, WMI management would hope that they’d do so in searching for information about WMI but the reality is with such little substance on offer (which is partly due to the lack of a need for an article directory on WMI in the first place), sites like WealthJournals aren’t really relevant to anyone.
Search engine crawl bots and internet indexers on the other hand, maybe. But in a business that deals with human to human interaction all that work might as well be for naught.
The expected outcome of WealthJournals is to instill brand confidence in Wealth Masters International, and as a standalone site it does a pretty poor job.
WealthJournals is the first project to be launched in what WMI are claiming to be ‘the first of several internet projects for the company‘.
Hopefully they’ve put a bit more thought into the rest of their internet strategy projects.
Kip & Karl just hosted a Special Encore Edition of the monthly Founder’s call that detailed the “NEW WMI” going forward, including several ground breaking initiatives. We filled over 1000 ports on our conference bridge up in less than 5 minutes so if you missed the call, or were unable to dial in, listen to the replay here for the entire recap!
To begin the call, our Founders candidly discussed the difficult decision to terminate their marketing partnership with Carbon Copy Pro. The official statement reads as follows
Important note: WMI will accept orders through the CCPro funnel until the close of business, Friday, December 10, 2010. After December 10, 2010, all orders and enrollments will be through the new WMI Marketing system (to be released this week) or directly from a WMI Consultant replicated website.
WMI also announced that the use of the WMI name, brand and product line CANNOT be used as leverage (points) with another, non-WMI program.
Finally, cross marketing of a competing product line is not permitted, as outlined in WMI’s Policies & Procedures for the past 6 years.
Why end the cooperation with CCPro?
CCPro has pretty bad reputation, and lose far more members than what is being recruited to WMI and CCPro together.
Here is a forum thread where it is registered which members have been enlisted to WMI since October 2010, and which members have resigned from CCPro around the same period. The forumthread is in Norwegian, but you can ignore the text in the first post and just look at the dates and membership data.
http://forum.hegnar.no/thread.asp?id=1830467
– Wminow.com/aboutme = recently recruited to WMI (only new Norwegian members)
– Oneyearplan.net = recently quit CCPro (world wide)
The lists are extracted by using a script or a similar method. I do not know the details of how these lists are extracted.
In summary:
24 new Norwegian was recruited in October.
61 new ones were recruited world wide in November.
(Norway, Sweden, Denmark = 25, rest of the world = 36)
210 members have resigned from CCPro in the same period.
Complete member list in CCPro and WMI:
The “mailinglist” was found (at YUDU.COM) googling for “WMI member list”
Membership lists were open on the web, but they now requires login and user name to see them.
242 pages with 64 names on each page
= Maximum of 15,500 members overall in CCPro and WMI
– Including those who have resigned
– Including about 10 percent “double registered”, “test” or other invalid entries.
Namelist is a few months old, but it is from later than March 2010. I checked all 242 pages superficial as they still lay open on the web. I also downloaded a copy in zip-format before they protected it.
All figures they give themselves are considerably exaggerated. “We have 15,000 members” means that they have HAD 15,000 members in total over 6 years. At least 80 percent of these members have probably quit long ago. When Karl Bessey claims 35,000 members in his blog, it’s probably only a “wet dream”.
As far as I can see, the ditching of CCPRO is part of a greater strategy to keep the WMI business inhouse. This can be seen with the introduction of the two new franchises next year and supposedly with this ‘new marketing system’ coming out.
In short, WMI want a bigger slice of the pie. ‘Educating’ people in finance and then having them run off and spend their money on third party ventures doesn’t make them as much money as keeping everything inhouse.
Both Jay Kubassek and Aaron Parkinson can be said to be “in-house” in WMI. Jay Kubassek was Senior Vice President of WMI when I checked in 2009.
CarbonCopyPro is also “in-house” in WMI, with the same address as WMI in Sugar Land, Houston, Texas. The original CarbonCopyPro in New York has changed its name to “Omni Industries, LLC”.
All measures are of course part of a larger strategy. People rarely take any “independent action” in a business that is not part of a larger strategy.
I do NOT believe the strategy is aimed at keeping more of the business “in-house”. The philosophy of this business is ASAP = keep your business As Simple As Possible. “Do not produce anything yourself if others can produce it better and cheaper.”
The strategy they implement now is simply necessary to survive as a company. They replace the brand name CarbonCopyPro because customers no longer believe in this brand name. The name has simply become a “charged name” in marketing. People no longer believe in the ideas that this is a “home business”, or “a network where people help each other to progress.”
All the resignations of the members of CCPro says that this concept is about to die out.
They add new products to make the concept less pyramid-like. The only product they were selling were different “levels” of the same concept. The consultants do not sell “education and seminars”, they sell “business opportunities” of the same type that they have bought themselves.
New products and services will help to disguise the pyramid-like concept.
Yes, Jay Kubassek has been “inside” WMI, and he was inside before creating CCPro.
However, CCPro has still more than 1000 active members, and these members each pay $149 a month. $30 go to the sponsor, which means the money stream into CCPro is at least $120.000 a month. I have never seen CCPro being used to promote anything but WMI products, and if this no longer is possible, I guess most of the WMI consultant don’t want to pay their monthly fee for nothing.
This means that WMI has cut CCPro’s oxygen hose, and it will probably die silently in a few months.
Smells to me like WMI is the sinking ship with all the rumors flying all over the place about months of unpaid WMI commissions.
Looks to me like CcPro dumped them in favor of Oprah’s buddy David Bach and WMI got their feelingd hurt.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/12/prweb8014021.htm
I agree fluff articles are worthless. You would think WMI would have learned this a long time ago.
@M_Norway
Carbon Copy Pro itself seems to be continuing under it’s own name though. Surely WMI couldn’t get away with marketing the same marketing system under two different names?
I think ‘WMI Marketing’ has probably had rather significant input from Ryan Nelson and friends rather than the Kubassek party.