For example, take a look at QuestNet, an MLM company with 3 million members worldwide. They have a successful newsletter at Qpportunity.com, dubbed Questnet Online Magazine, that is published every other week.

The newsletter is very well structured with the following sections - Personal Development, Network News, Product Highlights, Product Promo, QShoppe Corner and more. They also keep an Archive to allow their subscribers to read past issues.

It’s quite simple to start an email campaign, and even easier to use one of the many hosted services like CampaignMonitor. You can create your campaign online, customize it with your design and send out the newsletters for a flat-fee of $5/campaign + $0.01/receipient.

There’s also advanced testing tools, e.g. to see how your newsletter would look like in Outlook or Gmail, and integration with Google Analytics to track the campaign.

Easy isn’t it? Now, you only need to work on the content.

As your business grows bigger, you will have to contend with poor product reviews, false claims, competitor attacks, squatters and even hate sites - hate sites are the worse because they are more believable since they are created by genuine customers who have bought and dislike your products. Don’t believe me? Just check out www.ihatedell.net for an example.

In the early days of ORM, a company would just engage an SEO consultant to bury these “negative” websites in search engine results by means of optimizing existing company websites or by creating spam, e.g. Facebook page, Wordpress blog, etc.

This method worked well and especially for smaller companies. But as the search engines became smarter, it became more difficult and less effective to do this. On Yahoo, while you could dominate the top 10 results, the negative ones may appear in the form of “suggestions” below these search results.

Hence, a more effective (and sustainable) method going forward is to create a “PR” website where you highlight the positives, explain the problems (if any) and give an assurance that you’re working to resolve them.

One such example is a website called QuestNet Scam, which at first glance looks like a hate site. But upon visiting the website, you will learn that it’s a very clever PR effort. The company comes clean about it’s shortcomings right from the beginning, explaining that the problems they face is not unique to them but to all MLM companies as well.

They do this subtly using a Q&A with QuestNet’s MD and emphasizes the company’s strong points at the end - established since 1998, 3 million members, presence in 160 countries, blah, blah, blah.

There are 3rd party reviews/testimonials in the QuestNet Reviews area to show that the company has it’s fair share of satisfied customers, and thus cannot be a scam. They also explain about their problems in India and how they are working to address them.

Infact, the site doesn’t even convince readers that it is NOT a scam but instead give them QuestNet’s side of the story and them let them decide for themselves.

Isn’t this a smarter way to manage your online reputation?

Your website is the online version of your physical store. Not only that, it’s “open” 24 hours a day and customers can come in to learn about your product and make a purchase too - websites are so powerful! Now, would you walk into or buy from a store that looks dirty and smells bad, where the whole place looks suspicious and the products are hard to locate? I’m pretty sure the answer’s NO! The same goes for websites.

Features of a website that you should pay attention to:

1) Flash Animation
- unless you’re in the “creative” business, forget about fancy flash animations that take ages to load.

2) Web Design
- having a pleasant design is a given but you must also ensure that your website projects the correct image about your company. Menus should be visible and self-explanatory for easy navigation - consider adding “breadcrumbs” so your visitors know where they’re at. There should be proper meta titles and page titles on every webpage so your visitors (and search engines too) know what the page is about.

3) Webpage Content
- most people don’t actually read webpages but scan across the content. Hence, use a condensed version (short paragraphs are good too) and give them options to learn more, e.g. Click Here For Details, Download Product PDF, View Powerpoint Presentation and Watch A Video.

4) Web Hosting
- web hosting is cheap these days so there’s no reason not to get a proper hosting plan. The idea is to ensure your pages load fast enough for a smooth surfing experience for your site visitors. Infact, if there’s heavy internal use like lots of big email accounts or an Intranet, you should just go for dedicated hosting - check out Questnet Hosting for a sample of what’s included.

5) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- ok, there’s no point in having a fantastic website but no visitors. Sure, you can advertise but doesn’t that costs money?! SEO is optimizing your website for search engines like Google and Yahoo, in order to rank high in their search results for a set of targeted keywords - I know it’s a mouthful so read it over a couple of times until you understand. Of course, there’s no guarantee with SEO but for a slice of the 1,000,000,000 searches/month and a chance at free, targeted traffic, I think it’s difficult to ignore. Besides there are many SEO consultants our there, from those who charge peanuts to those who charge an-arm-and-leg - pick one that’s reliable and suits your budget.

Good luck!