Network Marketing can be very similar to a soap opera. Instead of whose marrying and divorcing who, it’s who is working with who, who left what business, and who is selling what now.
Here’s a fairly impartial tale of recent events, from the November 5, 2014 public announcement of WUKAR until now, January 2016. A friend recently asked me if so-and-so was still in Company X, so I decided to chronicle some of the events.
Sometime in 2014, Richard Cook and Matt Trainer were introduced to Dubli, a company that sells a cash-back program, where people get cash back when they buy from online websites that are in the network. While I believe Richard has a network marketing background, Matt Trainer said he always disliked MLM, and has returned to that stance today. Matt always believed he could generate substantial of income just by promoting the Dubli product, without focusing on the MLM commissions and downline. Matt’s has an amazing background, part of which includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
The June 21, 2014 Dubli Dubai Event
Dubli held it’s international corporate event in Dubai June 212,22 of 2014. Based on the video below, it looks like 90 people went from the USA, representing themselves as Wukar.
The November 5, 2014 Public Opening
Wukar announced itself to the public on November 11, 201, which include “The Rotator” (explaind below) and eventually “The Millionaire’s Club” – a guarantee that Matt would not take any money out of his Dubli earnings until people that made certain commitments had each reached a million dollars in earnings after a given time period.
Through traditional networking of who you know, word of mouth, and good selling, the Cooke/Trainer team brought in some big players. Tony Rush, a million dollar earner with Empower Network, left that company to join. Most likely, he brought John Lavenia with him. John had also spoken on stage at Empower Network nation wide events. Later we will also see Randy Schrum working with Tony and John, so he may have come over at that time as well.
The other big names involved in the kick off were Jason Cardamone and Kristian Hoenicke… Most of these leaders made a quick decision to go Dubai for a major the above mentioned Dubli event; and they came back sharing the excitement. In two or three months, they did a huge recruiting effort, apparently building one of the biggest downlines in Dubli in a short time.
The Rotator, SEO, and Video Making Extravaganza
So back to Matt Trainer. His secret sauce promoted at the above announcement was a “Rotator” and a lead generation system powered by videos, local directories, and SEO techniques. He adopted the name Tem WUKAR, which stands for “Wake Up, Kick Ass, and Repeat.” The system involved hundreds, if not thousands of peoples generating short, one or two minute videos using a simple video creation tool called VideomakerFx.
Training was created for people to follow, and keywords were provided by the Wukar web site. Your keyword might be “Best Price Hotels in Atlanta GA”, or “deals on washer dryers in Austin”. Most all the keyword were local, i.e. included a city, suburbe, and/or zip code, and seemed to be primarily targeted at travel and high ticket appliances. This makes sense, because a prospect could perhaps justify the annual cost of Dubli on one expensive purchase.
Once the Wukar member got his keyword, he would create the video. This could typically be done in 5 to 15 minutes. Several templates were provided, and the videos would be very similar except for minor changes like person’s name, colors, and keywords. Then the video would be uploaded back to the Wukar site, and points were awarded for the work accomplished. At the beginning, it was anticipated that there would be various types of tasks in the future, but due to what happened next, the only task the materialized was making videos. Some members systematized this process into an assembly line, getting 10 keywords at a time, creating the videos while even watching TV, and then uploading all 10 videos.
Points earned from the videos were to get people leads from “The Rotator”. It’s ironic how the “The Rotator” (notice that I put it in quotes) was so amazingly popular. It seems as though people loved “The Rotator” as a source of free leads, a way to sell their product and build their downlines, without having to do traditional selling. Matt said many times, that there is nothing special about a rotator, that you can get free or $5 PHP scripts that do that. For example, a leader in an MLM company will often broker a deal for a large number of deals, and create a “co-op” of 10 or 25 shares. Each member of the oo-op is put in the rotator, and gets a share of leads, based on the shares he purchased. The secret sauce to Matt’s rotator was the source of the leads, and the idea of members earning points by contributing to the lead generation process, by performing tasks such as creating videos.
The points in the rotator almost became a new currency. Some people were considering hiring outsourcers in order to earn more points but Matt always warned against that, because it didn’t make business sense until the value of a lead was known.
Jason Cardamone Presenting “The Rotator”
I can’t guarantee the videos below will be around for long. The first one shows Jason Cardamone presenting the rotator and the tasks. The second one shows Tony Rush, John Lavenia, and Kristian Hoenicke announcing Dubli. [Note: Cardamone is not spelled Cardamon nor Kardamon/Kardamone, but I’m including these alternative spellings to help you find this article with Google.]
Jan 2015 – WUKAR Holds It’s “First” Annual Event
Wukar held it’s first event in January 2015 in Rich and Matt’s home town of San Diego. Speakers included Jeb Corliss, one of the world’s leading “wing-suit flyers“. That’s similar to parachuting in one of those suits that makes you look like a flying squirrel, see the video below for an example.
Michael Bernoff presented topics relating to selling, attitude, psychology and NLP. A live stream was made available at a cost. Here’s a sample of his speaking before a different live audience:
At the event, Jason Cardamone was named “King of Wukar” for his hard work, being the face of Wukar, creating numerous vidoes and webinars, and for this general enthusiasm and success in Dubli. He announced on stage that he was making enough money to take care of his Dad, so that he wouldn’t have to work again. Tony Rush and John Lavenia presented the Dubli opportunity from the stage.
Software, System, Rotator Delays
I have seen many great software and marketing systems delayed for numerous reasons. For example, the IPAS2 system that Chris Jones created for Empower Network is an amazing system, but it was fraught with delays and deadlines were missed during its launch. Simialrly, Wukar’s backend system seemed to always have problems and delays. The 1000s of people that were involved with the video creationed created over 1.4 if not 1.5 million videos. This is the perfect example of crowd-sourcing. For example, 1.5 million videos can be created by 10,000 people doing 150 videos each, or 1000 people doing 1500 videos each. Imagine if it would have cost $2 per video, no one company would have invested $3 million, even in outsourcers to create that many videos without testing first.
The original idea was that the videos would be uploaded to YouTube, and perhaps some of them were. But you cannot upload 1.5 million videos to YouTube without setting off some alarms and bells, and any account with those types of videos would likely get shutdown as spamming YouTube. So the Wukar development team did an amazing thing, and created Videos.TeamWukar.com. This was a video site, all run on Wukar servers, that looked and acted a lot like YouTube. It was even possible to add an existing YouTube video to that server; this provided a mix of content so that all the videos wouldn’t be simply advertising Dubli.
So as time went on, Matt reported that the videos were not converting well. The rotator was not turned on yet, and people became impatient. What seemed like a sudden change, Tony Rush, John Lavenia, Randy Schrum, and Kristian Hoenicke launched HomeBusinessLabs.com as an their own brand of recruiting and marketing Dubli, and parted ways with WUKAR and Matt. They made HomeBusinessLabs free to join, but there is also a “pro” version with $97 monthly fee for those that want additional features such as lead generation tips and tools, along with SEO. As of today, the free version contains over 20 training modules, by the above leaders and Tracey Stark. Topics include both generic marketing related to social Randy Schrum seems to be the lead gen guy and Bobby Baker is behind the SEO of “My Inspired Media” platform.
The Great Divorce
HomeBusinessLabs first appeared in January 2015. It was presented that it was designed for those that preferred to promote the network marketing opportunity, where as Wukar would continue with the original plans. So at first, the leadership there seemed to be still be friendly with Wukar. Some time later, it would seem that the creators of HomeBusinessLabs were quite upset with Matt Trainer, and some ugly things were said and accusations made. The guys who started HomeBusinessLabs tended to be from Network Marketing backgrounds, where as Matt was more from an SEO, customer getting, anti-MLM position. One advantage to HomeBusinessLabs.com is a sister site (available to its members) called CashBackAuthority.com, which can be entirely coded to ones membership ID. The concept is that is truly an authority site, with hundreds of articles. A member can post links to those articles in their various emails and social media marketing.
Matt parted ways with Dubli, finding based on testing that that he could not get the videos to convert profitably. Hosting 1.5 million videos entails a larger cost in disk, servers, and bandwidth. Soon it was announced that WUKAR Academy, or Wukademy was being created, and this would be a premier online training site for all types of online marketers. The ideas was there would be courses, and a student/member would proceeed and have to work his way through the courses, and pass them.
In July 2015 Matt attended the a men’s camp called “Warrior Week”. I believe this gave him some new chutpa to deal with his haters and detractors. The Soap Opera gets a couple of other wrinkles. Matt has emergency surgery from which he recovered, and married Tar’Lese Rideaux (June 20th, 2015), who was very active from Day 1 of Wukar and now is listed as its CEO (as well as CEO and founder of Brains, Bodies, and Bank Accounts). She seemed to excel in her use of social media to promote WUKAR and the Dubli cashback offers.
Matt is not against running multiple businesses. He launched another venture called “TheAutomati.com”, a play on the phrase “Illuminati” and advertising included a hooded brotherhood of men having the secret to SEO success. So “The Automati” is a monthly membership, with multiple levels, that determine how many sites you can put into “The Automati” search engine optimization tool. He also packaged in some of his past trainings on how to succeed in online trading, a system for playing BlackJack, and a system for building niche-based income online.
A somewhat natural or organic offshoot of “The Automati” was “The Manhattan Project”. It’s unclear if Matt is an owner or trainer there, but the idea is to build “Rank-to-Rent” sites. These are small niche website such as “Austin emergency plumber”, or “Arlington Fast Mortgage.” One gets them ranked with “The Automati”, then sells or rents them to local businesses. Other systems on the internet teach similar systems, but use other SEO techniques other than “The Automati”.
As a side note, I believe “The Automati” is created by MadLabs Research, lead by Peter Wray. My best guess is that Matt licensed “The Automati” from them. The company creates products mostly around SEO and other internet marketing techniques. Another product they sell is Medussa, which uses an SEO technique of creating duplicate content except for the location. That tools will take one web page, and create 1000s of copies of it, typically substituting a geo-location in the title or page header.
In mid-2015, HomeBusinessLabs.com made a surprise announcement. They had developed their own expertise in buying and/or selling opportunity leads, and found a match between a set of leads and another business opportunity. They created sort of a clone of HomeBusinessLabs.com called WealthInHealthLab.com, and offered people to join Team Beachbody. The latter is famous for it’s TV infocommercials, a wide variety of fitness routines, especially Tony Horton’s PX90, as well as a meal replacement or supplement called “Shakeology”. For legal or ethical reasons, they found they could not both generate the leads, sell them, and promote Team Beachbody, so they offloaded to the lead generation to MDCDot.com, and referred people to those leads and to Team Beachbody from their WealthInHealthLab.com site. And just like HomeBusinessLabs.com has CashBackAuthority for members, WealthInHealthLab.com has sister for those participating in the MDCDot.com leads program, called http://GettingFitTogether.com.
Mudslinging and Lawsuits?
Allegedly, Matt was given conversion statistics of how well the Dubli offers/funnel converted, and believed he could build an SEO empire around that. Dubli claims they never published any conversion rates, and have filed a law suit against Matt. (For details, see http://behindmlm.com/companies/dubli-network/wukars-matt-trainer-slams-dubli-they-lied-to-us/).
In January 2016, Matt shifted gears and made some announcements. He said Wukademy was not really what he wanted to do. However, to his credit, he is still guaranteeing traffic to people in the original rotator. A system is up, where people can put in any URL/offer they wish to promote, and Matt will send business opportunity type traffic there.
Summary – Lessons Learned
I am fairly neutral about the whole thing. Since I’m starting my own SEO business, I wanted to see Matt’s internal processes as close as possible on how he was building his empire.
Here are some lessons we can learn:
1. People like Matt Trainer and Tony Rush play at a bigger level than most of us. Each of them have made more than one million dollars in their own respective ways; and in doing so each has a large network of friends, acquaintances, and most even enemies and haters. They take greater risks, and have greater rewards or setbacks. They are willing to make big claims, and to put their necks out on the so-called chopping block. No business is guaranteed, and there is no end of people looking to make money in these types of businesses.
2. Software and processes almost always takes longer than expected. Lead generation is a key process in the success of any business, but so is good planning and testing.
3. When you piss off the wrong people, and say the wrong thing publicly, you can face lawsutis.
4. Business leaders are alert to new opportunites; agile enough to move when the payout is there. It seems to be possible to promote more than one opportunity at the same time (althought many gurus teach against this).
5. Network marketing leaders always have their special inside coaching and courses to sell. Nothing wrong with that. It helps the up and coming marketers by gleaning from the guru’s years of experience.
6. We can also learn that people choose the type of mentors they want to follow. Tony is a smart business guy, with a relaxed southern attitude and draw. He constantly refers to how he rose in his business from a manager of a book store. He seems to be MLM through and through, and has proven himself in that industry. Matt Trainer on the other hands, is more of tech-wired individual who always has teams of programmers working with him. He seems like a renaissance man who has proven himself in investing, SEO, marketing, and even BlackJack.
7. We can also learn how teams come together to round each other out. Tony appears to have connected to the lead generation and tech experts that make sites like HomeBusinessLabs and WealthInHealthLab possible.
What You Can Do Today To Improve Your Financial Situation in 2016 and Beyond
I’m a proud member of Team Beach Body, recently lost 10 pounds using the Shakeology and following the on-demand videos. Most people don’t realize that an extra 20 pounds of weight can be so detrimental to your health.
To learn more, first check out Kristian’s video
Then see the replay of Randy Schrum and Josh Bartlet presenting the opportunity.
I can also help you with your Search Engine Optimization Dallas SEO.
