Review of Direct Matches

Review of DirectMatches.com - Here are the pros and cons of DirectMatches as I see it:

Pros

1. A huge number of newcomers to online marketing, home business, network marketing, etc. are members of the site. It presents a great opportunity to offer assistance and useful information to newbies and thereby attract them to your products or services.
   
   
2. The site automatically matches you with other members ("direct matches") with similar interests. In a sense, it does some of the networking for you.
   
   
3. It's not all Internet and network marketers on the site. There's a good number of brick & mortar small business owners and service professionals, e.g., insurance agents, as well as artists and musicians. That's more interesting on a personal level and can be more profitable for some businesses.
   
   
4. It's one of the most diverse sites in the Internet marketing, network marketing, or affiiate marketing areas in terms of ethnicity and class in particular.
   

Cons

1. The usability (user-friendliness) of the site is mediocre, at best. Specific examples include:
   
   
   • Their email program inserts a large blank rectangle over the top part of the email you're trying to compose. I wrote them months ago about this problem, as I'm sure other members did. Last time I was on DirectMatches, it was still there.
     
   • The forum requires you to use raw HTML code. Since a lot of people don't know how to do that, the posts end up having no structure; just once sentence after another, all smushed together.
   
   
2. You can send and receive a very small number of emails. To make the site worth it for meaningful networking you have to upgrade to the "Customer" level at $9.95 a month. I didn't find that it was worth it--I was a free member for a long time after I dropped my Executive membership; I tried it at the Customer level for a few months; and I just went back to Free since the fee wasn't worth it for me (I hear it has been for other people).
   
   
3. If you join as an Executive, you will see (and hear) what I think is a major problem in network marketing: Overemphasis on the business opportunity to the exclusion of the product or service.
   
   The conference calls and emails pound home the concept that "building the business" is what it's all about. If you should dare to suggest that a) You can build a business with customers too; or b) That the site needs some improvements to improve the customer's experience, you might very well be laughed at or ridiculed. Not usually, but I heard it happen, and the response to such questions was always negative.
   
   I went back and forth several times with their tech support department (I never saw the owner or saw any correspondence from him that I recall) and leading (upline) distributors about the usability problems. The support staff saw what I meant to some extent but they tended to minimize the problems. The upline guys just kept repeating the mantra, "Don't sweat the small stuff man, focus on building your business!"
   
   Before my first month was completed, I cancelled the Executive membership.
   
   Mark
   --
   Mark D. Worthen, Psy.D.
   Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
   
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