I did a scary thing…

Sunday’s muse was a challenge to do something scary.

Thought I’d report on my scary thing…

Couple of weeks ago I posted the Top 50 Network Marketing Companies. That wasn’t scary. That was fun.

Then I watched the comments. Well over 100 already to the list posts. The scary part were those that were super pukey about having a list at all, or the Alexa ranking service itself…how it could be manipulated by bad people creating fake traffic, etc.

Should I publish those comments or not?

Scary.

Because it’s true. Alexa.com, the #1 traffic ranking service on the Internet (since 1996) can, like any measuring tool, like any statistic, be used for good and bad, and can be manipulated by cheaters to make their traffic to their sites look higher than it really is. Any tool can be used by a few for things that were never intended and which do harm. Alexa.com is no exception. People can and do cheat.

So I asked myself two questions:

1. Examine the Top 50 Network Marketing Companies list and see who should be on it, given what I know about the industry.

2. How many of these multimillion dollar companies would spend their time in front of their corporate computers, faking their traffic numbers with special computer programs so that they could rank high on Alexa. (I wonder how many of them even know what Alexa is.)

A 1. Review the list yourself: The most established companies in our industry are near the top of the list. Avon, Quixtar, NuSkin, MaryKay, Arbonne, Melaleuca…those and the other Top 50 are nearly all at least five years old. I have students from all but two companies on this list. All are alive and well today.

(There’s one, Success University, which I had never heard of before and will investigate a bit more to see if they belong on the list.)

A 2. I could not imagine that these big companies would all be spending their time faking their website traffic numbers, and that the numbers would happen come out so that the biggest ones (e.g. Avon, Mary Kay, NuSkin, Quixtar) were all clustered at the top, and that the entire Top 50 would also happen to be among the best known of the network marketing companies, most members of the expensive DSA.

The list matches what I know about the industry today. So I’m staying the course and will publish and update the Top 50 Network Marketing Companies each week.

Yes of course there are other measures of success. Like Inc. 100, or State company rankings, or past years’ growth (although that doesn’t predict the future, look at GM).

But Internet popularity is of particular interest to me. It’s the part of our economy that is growing the fastest, and it is THE place where the civilized world goes to SEARCH for stuff, from health to business opportunities.

When I first saw the results of the Top 50 myself, I will admit was delighted. What better thing for our industry than to be able to say that of the millions of websites that Alexa ranks, that OUR TOP 50 are in the TOP few percent of most visited sites?

Here’s why I say that. Out of perhaps 5-10 million websites Alexa ranks, including GNC, General Motors, Proctor & Gamble, our Top 50 are in the top 100,000! (Remember the lower those rankings the better…out of 10, where do you want to be? This is the same, only the numbers are bigger.) And if anything, Alexa undercounts since they count visitors on PCs only, not MACs. I have a Mac and no Alexa Toolbar.

And what if you’re not on the list?

No list will guarantee your success or failure. Use the Top 50 to help satisfy yourself that the world IS looking, online, to network marketing as an option for a business of their own. (See the comment from the teacher’s organization saying just that).

What matters most in your own success is not any list, but how you relate to others. Being real and authentic, with a story to tell – be it about the product or business – that’s what’s number #1.

So get a product story together that matters to you, and tell it to others in a human voice, with words a 13-year-old can understand. Someone to whom that story will ring true…if you have an achy knee story, tell others with achy knees what happened to you. Who knows, right? If you have a business story that’s genuine, tell that.

Anyway, just wanted to tell you my scary story. It was some of those comments. And they were scary because they were true. And yes, I published them.