A new application on Facebook, called Market Lodge will pay users a 10% commission on sales made on their recommendations. And vendors can submit products for approval, so long as they’re willing to cough up a 35% commission on each product sale.

Market Lodge is the brainchild of a startup called bSocial Networks. They’re betting that Facebook users will like the idea of helping merchants sell to their friends. I’m betting it’ll open the doors to a flood of fledgling Marketplace Molesters.

Here’s how you can make sure you don’t become one of them.

If you’re going to test Market Lodge, keep two things in mind

Facebook hasn’t been a friendly place for profit since opening it’s door to developers. I’ve never seen more useless widgets for fun and games in one place than what you’ll find after 12-months of “open door development” on Facebook.

And while Market Lodge is a step in the right direction, the way I see it, it’s got two challenges:

1. Facebook tried to capitalize on membership connections last year by introducing a marketing system that allowed friends to broadcast product endorsements to each other.

That’s been a dud. Mostly because Facebook’s users revolted when they realized there was a feature called “Beacon.” That little devil tracked and shared information about their purchases and other actions made on other Web sites. Users’ are now allowed to turn off Beacon, but it’s still a dud.

2. Online social networks as a whole have had trouble generating big profits from advertising. Even powerhouse Google Inc. has admitted that they haven’t found the right marketing mix partnering with News Corp.’s MySpace.com.

In both cases the problem is rooted in an old-school marketing mindset and interruption-style of communication. Understand this, apply the C.H.A.R.M. Formula of Tribal Seduction, and you’ll be ahead of the pack out of the gate.

Market Lodge is a good idea, but…

It actually makes it easier for regular Joe’s and Jane’s to make money making recommendations. But that’s where the danger lies.

“Average” people don’t know how to market or sell without Molesting friends and family. (Doubt me? Just think of a friend who’s all fired up about the new MLM they joined.)

Hell, most people who call themselves marketers or sales professionals don’t know how to do that. Even fewer know how to seduce.

Affiliates — keep it low key

So if you plan on becoming an affiliate with Market Lodge, keep it low key. Treat your recommendations relevant to topical conversations you engage in.

Unless you have a really strong personal brand that attracts a “clean” list of friends — stay away from network-wide promotional messages. And even if you’ve got that highly focused network of friends, take the time to create some good (connection-based) content as a mass message, and strategically inject a relevant recommendation.

Vendors — give it a shot

If you’re a vendor, you can request that bSocial add your product to their line up. The vendor registration process is ridiculously simple (which to me implies that you may not hear back from them if they don’t like your product.) You can learn more about becoming a Market Lodge vendor here.

If you’ve used Market Lodge, share what your experiences have been. And if you give it a try (either as an affiliate or vendor) come back and share your experience.

The fine art of turning spammers into prospects.

If you’ve spent much time on MySpace, Facebook, Ryze, DirectMatches, et al., you’ve probably received dozens, if not hundreds, of messages from total strangers telling you about their product or program. In some cases, these are obvious automated spam — no real profile, photo that looks like a model, etc. In other cases, though, it’s pretty obviously a real person actually trying to make a living online… just like you.

Now the ones that don’t seem to be real people, I just flag as spam and move on, but the others… well, if you are doing affiliate marketing, network marketing or any other kind of business opportunity, they are your prime audience. Think about it:

1. You already know that they’re receptive to participating in business opportunities, which makes them more qualified than about 75% of the population.

2. This is the important one… if they’re cold-calling you on MySpace with a full pitch on the first message, they’re probably not that successful at what they’re doing because it doesn’t work! That means they’re even more receptive to hearing about an approach that actually works.

Even if they’re not a prospect, they will know and meet other people who are prospects for you, and who might be a better fit for your program than theirs. Build a relationship and they may provide referrals. And in the extremely unlikely event that they actually are successful with their current approach, they’re worth getting to know, because you might actually learn a thing or two from them.

And besides, you’re not locked into just one opportunity, right? If you are, reconsider. And every opportunity you hear about, you learned about somewhere. What does it hurt to take a couple of minutes and see what they’re actually selling, if it opens up the door to developing a relationship with them?

I have an approach that I use when I deal with people in this situation. For me, it’s what came naturally — I think that’s an important point. I didn’t dream up this formula and start practicing it — I analyzed what I was doing naturally and found that in almost every case, there was a consistent pattern. And I knew that to share it with others, I needed to be able to break it down into simple actionable steps.

I call it the DCR Technique:

1. Deflect

2. Connect
3. Redirect

The first thing you have to do is deflect their pitch. Even if you might be interested in talking to them about it in more detail at some point, you have to get them out of selling mode and into connecting mode. Don’t just simply say “no” — explain to them why you’re not interested. Here are some examples of actual explanations I have used:

• “I just don’t do health & wellness products. It’s not that I don’t ever take them — I just know that I’m terrible about taking things consistently. Every time I try to, I end up with a half-full bottle sitting on the counter forever once I fall out of the habit. So it would just be hypocritical of me to push people into taking something on a regular basis when I know I can’t even do it myself.”

• “I think the network marketing travel business opportunities are pretty intriguing, but I know the founder of one of your company’s competitors (he’s a former client), and if I ever do decide to do that, I’ll sign up through him. For now, though, for the little amount of travel I do, the mainstream websites work just fine for me.”
• “I’ve looked at that company before, and while I’m sure the products are great, I’ve just made a business decision not to work with any products that aren’t sufficiently distinguished from what I can go buy at GNC or Whole Foods. That’s an uphill battle I just don’t want to wage.”
• “Actually, that sounds kind of intriguing. I would like to explore it more, but at the moment I’m swamped with various projects — too much on my plate to give it proper attention. Send me a link that I can look at and let’s touch base about it again in a couple of weeks once I’ve had a chance to look it over.”

See, in every case, I’m not just saying “no” or “not now” — I’m giving them some insight into how I make decisions and helping them get to know me a little better. Maybe I’m even giving them a good business lesson without it coming across as preaching to them. In any case, I’ve deflected their pitch, but set up further conversation.

Now that they’re out of selling mode, you can connect with them. Here are three key ways I’ve found to connect with people quickly. I generally do all three of them in my initial reply to them, right after I’ve deflected their pitch.

1. Read their profile. Find something you have in common and mention that. Share your experience or perspective on it.

2. Provide them a useful resource. I usually point people to one or more of my articles on internet entrepreneurship or network marketing, such as:
   • Passive Income: How to Earn More and Work Less
   • Make Money Online (Without Spending a Dime)
   • Juggling Multiple Streams of Income
   • The Real Problem with Network Marketing and MLM
   • 6 Questions to Check Out a Network Marketing Opportunity
   • 7 Lessons Everyone Can Learn from Network Marketing

   I’m also now starting to refer network marketers to Ann Sieg’s excellent free e-book, The 7 Great Lies of Network Marketing (you can point people to mine, or for a small fee you can give it out with your own branding). Or write some articles of your own that would be useful in this situation. Or refer them to one or more of those above. (But you probably don’t want to refer them to this post just yet!)

3. Ask them the magic question (in your own words, of course): “So now that you know that I’m not going to buy from you right now, tell me honestly… how’s this going for you?” You can expand on that with something like, “I ask because at one point I was cold-calling people via private messaging like you are, and it just wasn’t working for me.” 7 out of 10 people you ask this to will admit that it’s not going as well as they hoped. The other three will tell you it’s going great. Two of them are lying.

What you have done is three of the key elements for building rapport: found a common tie and expanded on it, provided something of value to them (asking nothing in return) and broken down the facade — the “happy face” — that they put on when they were in selling mode with you.

Now it’s time to redirect them. Do NOT at this point tell them about your program(s). Just open the door. Remember, the purpose of every communication is NOT to close the deal — it’s to move the relationship one step further along in the right direction.

Hopefully, you’ve set up with something along the lines of saying how cold-calling didn’t work for you. At this point, what you say is something like this:

If you ever want to know what’s working for me now, I’ll be happy to share it with you.

Guess what… 90% of people want to know. They have now given you permission to tell them about your program and are receptive to hearing about it.

Now personally, I’m involved in a number of different programs, but I have a couple I like to use as feeder programs. The first one I mentioned earlier: The 7 Great Lies of Network Marketing. It’s a great marketing tool for any network marketer, no matter what their business, and it’s a very inexpensive, one-time deal (there’s upsell potential on the back-end, but there’s a lot of value for the initial purchase price). But what’s key about this book is this: everyone who reads it relates to it. Most people who’ve been in network marketing, or even around it, for more than a month or two have experienced four or five of the lies she talks about in the book. And when people relate to the book, they relate to you who gave them the book.

The other one I like to tell people about is MyPowerMall. It’s about the easiest thing in the world to get people to sign up for, because:

• It’s 100% free, forever - it will never cost them a dime.

• They will save money on products they already buy from stores they already buy them from, even over and above sale prices, credit card rebates, etc.
• There’s no minimum participation in order to earn.

Consistently, the only group of people I have found who won’t sign up for it are Quixtar IBO’s, because they have a similar capability within Quixtar (but of course, it’s not free to join). Once they’re in, MyPowerMall has a very family feel to it. That, plus you’re making money together. Again, you’re building the relationship.

Those are the ones I use, but yours could be something else. It just has to be very low cost, or even free, to join, and should have a broad, universal appeal.

So what’s the point of using these feeder programs instead of just pitching them right away on your main opportunity?

Because you are building a relationship, not just selling them. You want to bring them into your sphere of influence — get them reading your blog and/or signing up for your newsletter, not just your downline communiques for one particular program. You want them to recognize your name, so that when they see a message or e-mail from you, they open it.

Now I know there are some people who are going to read this whole thing and think it sounds manipulative. It’s not. This is about building real, authentic relationships and being of true service to people. You’re helping them, aren’t you? If you’re not, you need to rethink the whole thing.

What this approach is doing is helping you maintain focus in your networking activities. Each individual relationship is not a means to an end, but the overall process of networking is not about building relationships just to build relationships, but about accomplishing your goals and helping others achieve theirs.

Scott Allen helps people turn virtual relationships into real business. He is coauthor of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, an A-list blogger as the Entrepreneurs Guide for About.com, and a monthly columnist for FastCompany.com. He runs his latest project, Revenue River, on the BLOG i360 New Media Marketing system.

If you want to be perceived as an expert, act like the true experts act.

One of the essential strategies of new media marketing is to position yourself as an expert on your topic. You can do this via a variety of methods: publishing articles, blogging, creating and posting video tutorials, podcasts or talk radio, webinars and so on.

But one of the easiest and still most effective is by participating in a group. This can be a group within a modern social networking site like Facebook or MySpace, or it can be a community built on technologies that have been around for years, like Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups (the modern incarnation of Usenet), discussion forums or e-mail discussion lists. Let’s be perfectly clear that “new media” strategies can be applied to media that is “old”, at least in internet time.

One of the things that I’ve been studying closely over the past five years is how exactly “real” experts behave in these settings. And when I say “real” experts, I mean the ones who have published books, speak at conferences, have peer-reviewed papers in trade journals, and so on. Are they necessarily the most knowledgeable on the topic? No. But they have the best reputations and are generally far more financially successful than the “wanna-be” experts.

You know the wanna-be expert… you’ve seen them. They always have an opinion about everything posted in the group. They’ll ramble on for paragraph after paragraph, making their case ad nauseam. And it seems that whenever there’s a flame war, they’re right in the middle of it, even if it doesn’t look like they started it.

If you want to be perceived as a real expert, not a wanna-be, you need to act like a real expert, not a wanna-be.

So how do real experts act?

In order to understand how real experts act, let’s look first at two key attributes of experts:

1. They’re busy. They’re working — writing, traveling, speaking, consulting for a client, whatever… Point is, they have better things to do with their time than spend all day in a discussion forum.

2. They’re extremely careful about what they say. They know that people are paying attention to them, and that has two consequences. First of all, they know that their reputation is on the line every time they open their mouth — that everything they say will be subject to scrutiny. Secondly, they also know that people will put a lot of weight into what they say and probably act upon it, so they feel a strong sense of responsibility to provide good information.

When you understand those things, it’s easy to see why experts behave as they do in this context:

• Experts post less frequently. They aren’t usually heavily, heavily engaged in the group unless it’s their own group or they have some kind of leadership role. Depending on the overall posting volume, anywhere from a couple of posts a week to just a couple per month is sufficient to keep their name out there.

• Experts aren’t quick to reply. They usually aren’t the first ones to join in the conversation. Remember, they’re not sitting there watching for posts as they come in — they may only even read the group posts once or twice a week. Also, they read and reflect on the reactions of others before posting their own thoughts.
• Experts consolidate the conversation, not fragment it. There’s a tendency in active groups for conversations to “fragment”, i.e., multiple people reply to the original post, then people create replies to the replies, and so on. Experts don’t typically reply to people individually, but rather create a single, longer post that addresses what several people have said all at once.
• Experts substantiate what they say. Experts are researchers. Sure, they have opinions, but most of them didn’t earn their reputations based purely on their opinions. So when they make statements in these groups, they often back it up by citing sources, whether it’s something they’ve written themselves or that someone else wrote. It’s especially helpful if you link to the sources you’re citing. And if it’s yourself, that’s a great promotional tool at the same time.
• Experts keep it professional. They certainly don’t participate in flame wars, and they rarely bring their personal issues into the group.

  Contrary to popular opinion, effective marketing in forums and discussion lists is not about volume, it’s about presence and positioning. Act like a real expert, not a wanna-be, and you will attract more business.

Scott Allen helps people turn virtual relationships into real business. He is coauthor of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, an A-list blogger as the Entrepreneurs Guide for About.com, and a monthly columnist for FastCompany.com. He runs his latest project, Revenue River, on the BLOG i360 New Media Marketing system.