MLM Success – The Tools You’ll Need – Part 1!
MLM Success, from the time that you start your new business, is reliant upon many things. One major factor in MLM success are tools out there that are available that you may not be aware of. With these tools at your disposal, you can properly coordinate your plan of attack.
When I first started in MLM, I was besieged with all this great information about the company and about the products they sold. But no one gave me any specific tools on how to proceed. My upline was doing things the old fashioned way; meet people, tell them about the product. We gravatated to doing conventions and doing public demonstrations that garnered us a little business as well. We hit the phones afterwards to respark the energy the people had when they met us. For me, however, being a mostly introverted person, “eagerly” meeting people only goes so far before I burn out.
Disclaimer: I don’t want to pitch you on any specific company here, I just want to introduce you to some of the companies out there that can assist you with your workflow so you don’t waste countless hours of your time waffling around.
1) AWeber – AWeber is an email marketing software that generates email autoresponses for you. By setting up an account with AWeber ($1, 30 day trial period, afterwards, $20+/mo.), you can create email campaigns for your company. It works by autoresponding (sending out emails) to anyone (your new lead) that signs up to receive new information from you. I was receiving a new email every 3 days from my upline before I got started and each email had some new information in it that I got curious about. After about 10 of these emails, I signed on. Pretty powerful communicating with people while you sleep. www.aweber.com
2) WordPress – WordPress is a blog tool and personal publishing platform. You must have a blog to communicate your business and help funnel people to your product. I like WordPress because it has a myriad of tools and widgets you can incorporate to assist you in getting ranked on the search engines. A WordPress blog is free via their website, but it is recommended you use an online provider like GoDaddy or HostGator to host it. That way, you have full access to all the tools WordPress has and you’re not limited in your creativity by the WordPress site itself. (See my blog entry entitled, “Will Your Blog be Deleted”.) Cost – $4.95 – 9.95/mo ISP (internet service provider)hosting costs, plus domain name registration. WordPress installation thereafter is free. If you don’t use HostGator or GoDaddy as your ISP, be sure to ask the company you use if WordPress is accessible through them.
3) Onlywire – Onlywire is a service that allows you to spread your content to multiple social sites at the click of one button. Getting the word out to everyone is the name of the game and Onlywire does this wonderfully. With one click, your information is sent to and automatically posted on dozens of social networking sites instantaneously. Onlywire is free and only takes a few minutes to set up. www.onlywire.com
4) Speaking of social networking sites, you need a Facebook account at absolute minimum. Facebook is number 3 overall in search engine rankings and is a self-marketer’s and promoter’s dream come true. With over 100 million users, 10 million active users each day, 375,000 new accounts each day, it’s crazy not to utilize this amazing platform to promote your message. Other people out there use MySpace, too. I’m a bit older than the typical MySpace user, so I stick with Facebook. Either way, use these, and other social networking sites to your advantage! www.facebook.com, www.myspace.com.
My second portion of the tools you’ll need for MLM success is next. Get the rest of the story by going to part 2 right now!
MLM Success – Learn the Basics FIRST!
MLM Success, plainly put, depends upon your understanding of the basics when you enter into your online or home business. A lot of information is going to be thrown your way very quickly and if you don’t know or understand the terminology, or aren’t able to quickly grasp presented concepts, it all may become very daunting to you. That is, at best, you’ll struggle for hours getting into the swing of things or at worse, it will all become so daunting that you quickly give up on it.
So here are the basics:
MLM Success depends upon a 4 tiered foundation:
1) Lead Generation
2) Conversion
3) Training
4) Retention
Lead Generation. The word “Lead”, is derived from the early days of sales. Salesmen would go door to door selling their products and when they found someone that was interested, they called them a “lead”.
What’s Lead Generation all about? Simply put, the more leads you can bring to your business, the higher the percentage of people that will join you and/or buy your product. Just like in a store. Who’s going to do more business? The store with a lot of customers in it or the one with very few? There are two categories of lead generation. First is face-to-face (or, “off-line” lead generation) and the second is online lead generation. There are endless methods for obtaining leads in both areas; what is most important is to find the method that works best for you and the one(s) you are most comfortable with.
Conversion. Conversion basically means, once you find someone who is interested in your product, how do you get them to sign up and/or buy from you. The MOST important fact to remember here is, people do not simply buy your product, they buy YOU as well. They buy your energy, they buy your passion, they buy from you because they *trust* you. Never, ever, compromise your integrity. It’s not worth it. Ask yourself, are you more likely to buy something again from someone you trust, know and respect? Absolutely. Congruently, you’re more likely to send them referrals, too, aren’t you?
Conversion also requires knowing your product and the how and why of it all. The more you know about what it is you’re selling, the more confident you are in making the sale. Your confidence breeds confidence in your buyer and hopefully a new and budding relationship will ensue. Finally, ask for the sale. In sales terminology, this is known as “closing” the sale. If you’re face-to-face (or on the phone), how can you make the sale if you don’t ask for it? Because if you don’t, your customer will simply think you were having one big informative chat on your product between the two of you. Seriously! Online leads may be a bit different in that your lead may actually have the gumption to click a button to sign up, but if they’re on the fence, it will do you a WORLD of good to get on the phone, have a nice (but brief) conversation with them and then ask them to sign up. Chances are, they won’t think anything of it and they will!
Training. Once you have someone signed up, you have to keep them fired up about the business. The best way to do this is keep them informed and keep them trained. The MLM I am involved with has weekly face-to-face AND a weekly online webinar to keep us all up to date and up to speed. Fortunately, for me, the founders of the MLM success system I belong to incorporate these type of meetings into the business and it’s a gas to tune in. Your knowledge base, skills and passion will continuously grow within you AND your new teammate by keeping the information flowing on a continuous basis.
Retention. Retention goes hand-in-hand with training. If you and your new teammates are fired up about the business, chances are they’ll be fired up to stay for the long-term and be equally as fired up about recruiting new leads to generate more prosperity for both of you.
That’s it in a nutshell. If you truly want MLM success, learn the basics first. Understanding these 4 principals will establish your MLM foundation and hopefully allow you to begin your new business by heading in the right direction. Get started in the right direction right now by going to my website and providing your name, email and phone number in the form at the bottom of the page and I’ll begin showing you all that I’ve learned on getting started and prospering with your new MLM.
Marketing on Facebook for FREE!
Want to obtain faster MLM success with your internet home based business? Did you know you can get free marketing on Facebook? It’s true! Besides that, it’s very easy, only requires a few small steps and is HIGHLY visible. What’s also great is you’re able to customize your advertising to say and promote anything you want to (keeping within Facebook overall guidelines, of course). And did I mention it’s all free?
As one of the top 5 visited websites of the world, entrepreneurs obviously know the power of promoting their product and services on Facebook. Having a lot of friends (that have a lot of friends, that have a lot of friends… You get the picture) that you can promote your business too is like money in the bank. However, those advertisements you see on the sides of Facebook’s pages aren’t free. Facebook, just like Google, know there’s real money to be made from these little advertisements and people will pay good money to buy their time. Unfotunately, as one friend of mine learned, having a little advertising link doesn’t always guarantee your link will be clicked and your product or service viewed. In fact, for 2 weeks of paid advertising, the poor girl only ended up with 80 total clicks and swore she’d never use Facebook again.
Well, here’s a solution I suggested to her that doesn’t cost a penny and stays on Facebook for as long as you want it to. It’s an application you can utilize within Facebook called “Custom Profile Box“. I incorporated my box into Facebook about a week ago and its already generated leads for my home mlm business. I designed the box on Facebook to incorporate 3 information capture boxes (name, email and phone number) and when someone puts in their information, voila(!), I have a new lead for my mlm business list that will always be there for me.
So here’s what you do: Obviously, you need to create a new Facebook account for yourself (www.facebook.com). Once inside Facebook, go to the white, rectangular search bar, upper right hand corner of all the Facebook pages. Type in, “Custom Profile Box” into the search bar and hit return. At this point, you’ll be taken to an application called, appropriately enough, “Custom Profile Box”. Basically, Custom Profile Box is an editor that generates html for you. What’s nice, as the name implies, is you can fully customize your box using whatever colors, text or size you’d like. You can insert images, strikethrough, and color backgrounds. Finally, once you’ve created your new box, you can go back and re-customize it again, and again.
Now, here’s the key! A lot of people have tried incorporating this application without success. What these poor folks do not understand, is there are just a few more minor steps that need to be taken care of in another area of Facebook. So, here are the steps, in order, to make sure you are successful:
1. Add the app and click “Apply” button on the confirmation window.
2. Edit the app settings for the app by hovering your mouse over the “Settings” menu and then selecting “Application Settings”.
3. On the list of apps, a drop down “Show” menu, select “Authorized” to show all the apps authorized to access your profile data.
4. Click on “Edit Settings” link next to the name of the app.
5. In the pop-up window, make sure the “Profile” tab is highlighted.
6. Next to the “Box” item is the word “Add”. Click on this to add a box to your profile for this app.
7.Decide and modify the Privacy depending on whether you want your friends and network only to see the box, or everybody etc.
8. You are done setting up the app.
9. Click on the “Applications” status bar menu and select the app from the pop up window.
10. An editor will load, and takes 30 secs or so on busy connection.
11. In the editor window type the text, place pictures and change font sizes, text colours etc as you need it. Try a simple text heading in bold and a few lines of text underneath for starters.
12. To save your creation to the app box, click on the “Update” button.
13. If all is well your box should appear in the boxes section of your profile.
14. Click on your profile, and select the boxes tab.
15. See your app box and your creation in it.
16. You can drag your box to any desired location on the page by left clicking the box and dragging around.
That’s it, a short simple setup course for you.
Hope it helps you all.
If you’d like to see my box, look me up on Facebook (Tom Gurnee) and friends me. Be sure to look at my custom box under my “Boxes” tab and it will be the first thing you see on that page! As always, you can find my mlm business at http://www.aworkingmlm.com. Good luck!
MLM Success Strategy – What is Affiliate Marketing?
One MLM success strategy with your network marketing and internet home based business comes from funding yourself via outside means.
Since the internet exploded onto the scene a decade or so ago, advertisers were exceptionally quick to realize the potential in exploding their products and services. One major way they have added to their profits is by offering incentives to people out there to sell their products. This is called Affiliate Marketing. To the novice, Affiliate Marketing, simply put, is a way of making a little money (a commission) for giving a company the opportunity to promote its product or service on your website.
It happens like this. ABC company has a product or service they want to market and sell. In exchange for placing an advertisement on your website (that they create), they will pay you a commission (anywhere from 10% upwards to 75%!) if someone clicks on that advertisement and buys their product or service. That’s it. For the time it takes to copy and paste some simple code into your blog or website, you could potentially reap hundreds, if not thousands of dollars from your affiliate company.
Many companies out there allow you to join their affiliate program with no questions asked. All you do is click a button to sign up as an affiliate and in less than a second you become approved. Other companies want to qualify your website or blog first and will get back to you with approval if they feel your site is appropriate for them to partner with. Still other companies will do further checks to find out how much traffic your site generates. And therein lies the key! For obvious reasons, the more people that visit your site, the more opportunity there is for someone to click on the advertisement you’ve posted and the more opportunity there is to make money. Not just for yourself, but for the ad company themselves.
How do you get started with Affiliate Marketing? One major resource is a website called, Commission Junction. There are other affiliate websites out there such as Linkshare.com, Pepperjam.com, AffiliateBOT.com… CJ.com, is one service I use and am comfortable with so we’ll use them as our demo company. CJ.com, as with the other companies, host-sponsor thousands of companies and corporations that want to do business with you! What’s great is it’s typically very easy to get set up with your affiliate (in this case, CJ.com). When you go to their website, click on the “Publishers” menu link. From the drop down menu, click “Application”. Begin filling out the required information and read and confirm the service agreement specifics they ask for. After you’re approved, you need to confirm the account by going to your email and retrieving the password they send you.
Once you’ve logged into CJ.com, go to the Account tab and check over your admin settings. You’ll also need to fill in some tax information, too. If you don’t have a company name of your own, simply use your personal name in some of those required boxes. No fake info here! This is the IRS you’re dealing with now… After you’ve set this up, go the menu tab called, “Get Links”. Here, you’ll see the hundreds of advertising categories to choose from and within, you’ll find the thousands of companies that you can choose from to work with. If there’s a particular company (“Advertisers”) you want to work with, put the company’s name in the search bar and see if it comes up. If there’s an industry you want to work with and don’t care which company you select, choose one of the “Advertiser Categories” and see all the different companies you can select.
So let’s do an example! You’ve probably seen on my blog, http://www.aworkingmlmblog.com, that I sponsor Host Gator. I like this company for many reasons; I like their customer service, I like their credibility and I like the fact they are located where I grew up, Houston, Texas. So, from the “Get Links” menu tab, we see a search bar that says, “Advertisers”. Type in, “Host Gator” into the search bar and click, “Find”. Host Gator now comes up for you. Underneath the small Host Gator graphic, you’ll see some highlighted text there called, “View Links”. Click this link. As you now see, all the different sized graphic and text affiliate links are now available to you to choose from. You’ll also see the colomns, “3 Month EPC” and “7 Day EPC”. These are the monetary values this particular ad has generated over the past 3 months and 7 days.
Once you’ve selected which affiliate link (ad) you’d like to use, simply click on it. For our example, we’ll choose the first Host Gator affiliate link; the 468×60 Full Banner ad:
Once clicking on this link, a new box opens on your screen with some detailed information regarding this link. At the bottom of the box, click “Join Program”. After this, since Host Gator is a company that accepts everyone, you now see a congratulatory statement that says you are now an affiliate for Host Gator. “Close” this box and you’re now taken directly to the html screen. Simply click “Get HTML” at the bottom of the box. Another box now opens for you and you’ll see the appropriate affiliate code that has been generated for you. Click “Highlight Code”, and now copy this code. Close the box, go to your website or blog and insert the html code into the appropriate area on your site. Refresh your web or blog page to make sure it appeared and voila! That’s it! You’re done! How simple can that be?
IMPORTANT NOTE: Do NOT, repeat, do NOT click on your banner advertisement or link after you’ve inserted it. In your agreement with CJ.com and the advertiser, you specify you will not personally click these advertisements yourself, OR get your friends to do it to drive up the number of clicks. These advertisers have ways of checking up on you and they’re able to tell if you personally have been tampering with your new affiliate button. If they catch you, they’ll ban you – “they” meaning CJ.com. Don’t do it. It’s not worth sacrificing so much money out there that is to be made so easily.
Be sure to sign out of CJ.com when you’re finished locating and adding advertisers to your sites. One final note, be aware of how your affiliate advertising appears on your website. Personally, I get turned off when someone’s site is clogged with ads flashing at me from all different angles or when I can’t find what I’m looking for because there are too many. Use discretion. By incorporating affiliate marketing into your website so it neatly blends in with what your site is all about, your guest will be more apt to find you a trustworthy source and will then, in turn, trust your affiliate link as well. Hopefully, the next thing you know, CJ.com will be making a deposit into your bank account!
Will Your Blog be Deleted?
You’ve built up a successful MLM network marketing and home based business for yourself, but all the hard work you’ve put into your blog is now…gone?!
A slightly disturbing fact came up the other day… Something I was totally unaware of that could have some potential serious ramifications! The question came up, “Do you own your blog?” Re-phrased, do you “host” your own blog, or, as most of us do, are you simply “using” a blog from a blog website? Recently, I discovered I was in the latter group and to my horror, I found out that at any time, on any day, if the owners of my blog deemed that for any reason, whatsoever, my content was inappropriate, ZAP! My blog could disappear in the click of a mouse.
It’s absolutely true! If you’re not personally hosting your own blog, you stand the chance (albeit a very minute chance - but a chance just the same) at having your blog deleted. All of your hard work, all of your time invested, all of your followers (your leads!) and their comments, gone. Years and years of work and your number one Google ranking, gone. Did someone at the blog company not like you anymore? Did someone complain? You’ll never know and there’s nothing you’ll be able to do about it. For me, the fact was too much to fathom and the idea that all of my articles and all the help I’ve given to my fellow MLM’ers could disappear was simply inconceivable.
Fortunately, the solution to avoid this potential disaster is fairly simple. Host Gator and Go Daddy offer blog hosting. I was disappointed to hear that the ISP I’ve used for years (1and1.com) does not WordPress blog host and if there are other ISPs out there that do host, my apologies, I just don’t know who you are at the time of this writing. The only catch for hosting your own blog is; just as you would pay for hosting a domain name of your own, you also have to pay for your blog hosting on these ISPs. However, perhaps your peace of mind is worth about $60 a year… Host Gator and Go Daddy both offer Fantastico; an easy to use auto-installer for WordPress style blogs.
What’s key about this, is WordPress style blogs offer you a myriad of amazing plugin features that strangely enough, don’t show up via their own website. That is, when you sign up at the WordPress.com website for one of their .com blogs, you are not allowed to add any plugin features to your blog. But, when you host your own blog using a WordPress style blog, you can add as many as you would like. Interesting…
It’s these plugin features that truly make the monthly/yearly expense worthwhile. A few plugins I found out about include auto-responding, delayed thank you note style auto-responding, multi-site plugins, Twitter updater, Digg This, social networking plugins, the list goes on and on.
Obviously, the power of blogging is just that, powerful. Creating a blog following is just as important as having a large social network following in terms of your business and the larger your crowd, the more attention it receives from those who have advertising dollars and those who want to open their wallets. The affiliate link possibilities are endless, the business exposure is grand (and FREE!) and most importantly, your peace of mind remains intact.
How to Achieve MLM Success? Make Money Along the Way!
Achieving MLM success can be a bit daunting at first, especially if you don’t have the budget for starting up. Here’s one way, to help generate cash to help supplement your growth and keep you in the game.
For one that is relatively new to the game of Attraction Marketing and Affiliate Marketing, the learning curve direction can be bent quite heavily towards the north at first. Fortunately though, every day brings new information and new possibilities and it’s things like this that I find to be a lot of fun and hopefully you will too!
Obviously, you’ve seen all those advertisements on the sides of the webpages, on Yahoo, on Facebook, yes everywhere. But for those of you who aren’t quite as internet savvy as you’d like to be, or if this subject is simply new to you, did you know that all those advertisements you see were probably not placed there by the company themselves? In fact, it’s highly unlikely the sponsoring advertisement company even knows they’re on someone’s website at all. Welcome to the huge (and highly profitable) world of known as Affiliate Marketing.
Affiliate Marketing is all about advertising and your making a little money along the way for giving a company the opportunity to promote its product or service on your website. I’ll get more into the specifics of Affiliate Marketing later, but for now, suffice it to say that to make your initial MLM successful, you’re going to need the assistance of a few companies out there and if you end up paying for a service they render, they, in kind, will render something back to you for referring someone to their company. Hence, you make some extra money along the way.
Here are a few examples:
Host Gator:
GoDaddy:
I’ll go into the specifics of why I like and use these companies later, but for now, understand that when you or someone clicks on these links/ads below and you then in turn order their product or service, these companies will send a little check in the mail to say thank you (to me) for referring your business to them.
Do you see, how powerful and lucrative Affiliate Marketing can potentially be for you? And you really don’t need to know very much; it’s all quite easy to learn.
What’s important to know, is that Affiliate Marketing plays a useful role in your MLM business. Everything you need is laid out for you, in order and from top to bottom. Yes, those who have sponsored you will make commissions on what you may end up using to help you in your business. Conversely, you’ll make commissions on those souls you sign up!
Therefore, as you’ll learn more, Affiliate Marketing is a small, but powerful way to make money while helping you along the road to generating daily leads.
Getting Ranked on Google
To help increase my MLM success with my network marketing and internet home based business, I’m always looking for ways to increase leads and exposure by making sure I’m doing everything I can to get ranked high on Google. Here’s what I recently found out!
A few days ago I was introduced to a gentleman named David Wood. David Wood is an expert at generating hoards of internet traffic to virtually any website. I learned that he put together a strategy of MLM success secrets on how he accomplishes this and I’m excited to have recently learned what some of these strategies are.
In one of his blogs, David talks about reading yet another blog entry that claimed to teach all of the hidden secrets of marketing online. Problem was, as he explained, it was just another jacked up advertisement for someone’s ebook that did its best to psych you out on positive reinforcement and “you can do it” mantras. “What people need is real MEAT when it comes to marketing online,” David professes. And it’s true. People need REAL principals and real foundational concepts. Not just wordy ebook pep rallys that we’ve all come across…
One of the first MLM success principals David talks about in driving people to your website is that it is absolutely necessary to have original and valuable content and offer it free of charge. When your visitor sees information that is relevant and information he can immediately use and put into action, he’s highly likely to return. And not just once, but again and again. However, if your website looks like yet another blase canned, template driven site, chances are you’ll lose them in just a few short seconds and they’ll forget you ever existed.
Another MLM success principal about driven traffic is in relation to Google. Google is king and what everyone knows is the higher you rank on Google, the more business you’re going to generate. What people don’t understand though, is, it’s not the compelling information on your site that generates the number one ranking, it’s how many other sites out there that are linked to it that counts and how important they in their own rights. For example, if Yahoo and MSN and other major sites out there are linking to your article, your going to scream to the top of their search engines. Also, if your article includes social bookmarking and video, those sites, too, will drive your rankings to the top.
One last secret to share is that you want your marketing online to focus around one particular, central theme. You want to work to rank one page of your site around a few central keyword phrases and then, as David proclaims, “Create niche pages within your website that you promote.” “Ie, my current main domain ranks in Google for over 100 niche phrases within the first five results, but those rankings don’t all come from my front page. It’s the articles in my article directory that I promote individually for EACH niche.”
Simply put, the more niche traffic you generate over your competitors, the higher your rankings will be. Create more on topic content than the others and promote it properly. If you keep these principals in mind and understand that it’s basic principals that drive traffic to your site, you’ll zoom to the front in no time flat. Best of luck and we’ll see you at the top!
Welcome to A Working MLMs Blog!
Welcome to A Working MLMs new blog! Helping you to achieve MLM success! I will be working hard to assist you in learning about the best MLM success strategies out there todayand getting you up to speed w/ the system!
Ready to rock? Me, too! Let’s do it!
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