Archive for June, 2009
How to Generate an Endless Supply of Free Leads for Your MLM Business
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Congratulations! You started your MLM business and followed the advice of your sponsor. You wrote a list of names, your warm list, of your friends, family and colleagues and showed them your business presentation. Two weeks later 90% of them have joined, you have a thriving downline and have already broken company records for your earnings in your first 30 days. No? I thought not. Don’t be surprised or disheartened at this lack of support, or in most cases, downright negativity, demonstrated by those you consider to be your nearest and dearest. This is perfectly normal. Whatever you do, do not let it get you down. More importantly, do not quit! While it is true a few new networkers do have some success when they show their business to their warm market, let us not forget that they are in a very small minority. This approach may have worked very well as recently as 10 years ago, but now, with the internet and a host of new marketing methods available to networkers, chasing down prospects to join your business has become outdated.
The secret to being successful in mlm today depends on your ability to attract prospects to you. In the business we call this lead generation. It is the lifeblood of your business. Once your warm market has dried up you have be able to generate leads to continue to grow your business. It is simple. No leads equals no business. And please do not take the short cut of buying leads. You need hot leads that have responded to you, not leads that have been stuck on the hard drive of the lead generation company for weeks, having been sold to numerous other distributors from other companies, who have become equally despondent cold calling leads that have no recollection of ever completing some obscure online survey. Buying leads represents a waste of your time and your money.
So what are you to do? If you are just getting started (and even if you are not and have been in the mlm wilderness when it comes to generating leads) there are 3 things you must do.
- 1. Make a 90 Day Plan (this enables you to build momentum)
- 2. Work to a budget
- 3. Stick to both 1 & 2!
Chances are, if you are brand new to network marketing, you will not know what a realistic budget in the beginning is. Any figures I give here are purely arbitrary and based on my own experiences in this business. The important thing is to set a figure you are reasonably comfortable with to start. Note, I said reasonably comfortable. That is not to say stay in your comfort zone. Success in this business comes when you step outside of your comfort zone for long periods of time. Remember, you only progress when you overcome challenges. The more challenges you are presented with, the greater your opportunity to grow, develop a huge downline and residual income to match!
A typical figure for your budget then might be $500 a month. Try to increase this as quickly as you can. The more you can put in, the better your marketing campaigns can be. However, $500 is adequate if you are prepared to spend some time on cheap and free methods of lead generation. Please bear in mind that advertising in the making money / business opportunity niches is highly competitive and therefore very expensive, especially if you do not know what you are doing. I am referring to pay-per-click advertising (sponsored listings on Google, Yahoo, and MSN etc.) here. If you have the money, then fine, do pay-per-click. If not, and your budget is limited, I suggest you try the following methods first. Please bear in mind though that while pay-per-click can deliver results almost immediately, the following do require more time and patience. However, once you have momentum you will be generating an endless supply of free leads for your mlm business.
- 1. Sign up to MySpace or Facebook (or both!) and start to network. This is free. Develop your profile for your business. Yes, these are social networks and people are using their profiles to meet new friends and develop relationships, but let us not forget this is what network marketing is all about. If you are in network marketing you are in the business of developing and maintaining relationships. It is important not to pitch your business straight away to new contacts, but develop the relationship and trust first. Your profile gives you the perfect opportunity to showcase you and your business, just let that do the talking first and let your new contacts follow through themselves. I have personally enrolled new distributors into my mlm businesses using this approach, and the really sweet thing is I did not pay one single cent for them to be my lead!
- 2. Start a blog. A blog is an easy way to give yourself an online presence and is excellent for branding yourself. Demonstrate that you are a leader and know what you are talking about and prospects will be attracted to you. People join leaders, they do not join companies. Use your blog to brand and market YOU, not your company. Blogs enable you to get free traffic from the search engines. If you can provide valuable content that is indexed by the search engines you will be ranked in the organic listings. Why pay for ranking (ppc) when you can achieve high rankings for free clicks?
- 3. Article marketing. Write articles for distribution across the internet. You can publish your articles on your blog as well as numerous article directories. Ezine publishers are always looking for new content for their ezines and so when they use your article you get the exposure when your article is emailed to their lists. At the bottom of your article is a resource box or author bio which is where you can put your link back to your website. This is a completely free method which can, over time, as you submit more articles, result in an avalanche of free traffic to your website, hundreds of potential free leads.
In such a short article I cannot go into great depth and have only covered 3 free methods for generating leads for your mlm business. With methods like these it is really important to be consistent and follow your plan. Depending on your time available, a couple of articles submitted weekly, regular updates to your blog (fresh content!) and consistent relationship building on social networks, will, without doubt, result in much free traffic and new leads for your business.
What is Attraction Marketing and How Will It Help You Build Your MLM Business?
Posted by: | CommentsI’m sure most people have heard the phrase “like attracts like” or “birds of a feather flock together”. We do it all the time, often subconsciously. How often do you find yourself with friends who have something in common with you? Maybe you have similar interests or a similar outlook in life? We take it for granted that people who come into our lives are attracted to us in some way, whether a physical attraction, intellectual attraction etc., otherwise why would they be in our lives at all? So why do we treat building a network marketing/mlm business any differently?
Traditional network marketing, in which family, friends and colleagues all appear on your hit list and you pursue them relentlessly with your product/opportunity, only to hear a chorus of “thanks but no thanks”, is demoralising for any networker. Just ask anyone who’s started an mlm business and they’ll tell you how they were ready to quit before they got going, simply because the rejection by their nearest and dearest proved too much. I have in the past joined more mlm opportunities than I care to mention. For the first three companies I joined I diligently made my list and approached most people I’d written down on it. By the time you join company number 4 your friends and family believe you are a joke and keep asking when you’re going to do a proper job! They might be friends and family, but if they are negative and discouraging would you really want to work an opportunity with them? Are they really going to follow your lead? See you as a leader? No, I thought not!
This is where attraction marketing comes in. The day I discovered that there was another way to build your mlm business was an epiphany for me. I was first introduced to this way of doing things when I read Mike Dillard’s Magnetic Sponsoring book. The revelation that network marketing is not about the company you join or the products you sell, but is in fact about YOU and branding yourself as the expert. When you talk to a prospect about your business it’s not your business they’re really interested in hearing about. They don’t want to know about the compensation plan, what your products can do, how many countries the company trades in, or how long the company has been trading for. Fair enough, they’ll want to know those details at some point, but in the first instance they want to know about YOU and whether or not you can help them achieve their goals. Period. Prospects don’t care about anything else until they have established some kind of a relationship with you. They want to know if they’re dealing with an ‘expert’ or a complete numpty. The only way they’re going to find out depends on how well you brand yourself as the expert. You have to demonstrate that you are the leader they want to follow. People don’t join companies, they join leaders.
So what do you need to do to attract the right people into your business? For a start, you no longer need to convince people to join you. My definition of ‘convince’ is to talk someone into doing something they don’t want to do. Do you really want to spend your time with people like this? When you posture yourself as a leader they’ll be attracted to you, your personality, your positivity, your confidence in yourself. If you demonstrate that you need people in your business they’ll never follow you. The day that you realise that you know they need you more than you need them, is the day you no longer have to convince anybody to join your business. You will attract people into your business. People will call you to ask you about your opportunity.
If you want to attract a dynamic leader into your business, there’s only one thing you need to do – become a dynamic leader.
If you want to attract people with confidence – become more confident.
If you want to attract people with a great work ethic – develop a great work ethic.
If you want to attract a great business builder – become a great business builder.
In network marketing you don’t get what you want, you get what you are. Be the kind of person that leaders are attracted to. Become the hunted, not the hunter.
And if there’s one last piece of advice I should impart here – Read More! Nobody has made it in this business without learning all about their trade. For some reason most people who join an mlm business believe that they’re going to get rich quickly (or at least be in a position to quit their day job in days). Doctors, lawyers, accountants and teachers (to name only a few professions) have to train for years to be considered experts in their fields, so why would a network marketer know everything about this business after a couple of meetings or the odd webinar? Attractive leaders in network marketing educate themselves. They don’t just read one book, but are reading constantly to increase their value in this business.
To learn more about attraction marketing and how it will assist you greatly in building a huge mlm business I recommended Mike Dillard’s Magnetic Sponsoring as your starting point.
Does this sound familiar to you?
You join a network marketing/MLM business opportunity and one of the first tasks your sponsors asks you to do is write a list of names , (friends, family, colleagues) 100, 200, 400 names long, and if you’re struggling, look to the Yellow Pages for inspiration. Once you have that list of names, then begins the task of approaching every single person on it – and by now you already hate this opportunity, or more to the point, you fear the prospect of rejection from those you love the most. You feel as though every single one of them is looking forward to your failure so they can tell you they told you so! And even those courageous network marketers who get over this first hurdle, or shall we say ‘challenge’ in networking-speak, the next step – lead generation – presents as many opportunities to ‘get out of your comfort zone’.
Who wants to spend every weekend in the parking lot flyering cars (before you’re told politely where to go by an over-zealous jobsworth of an attendant), or standing in shopping malls handing out flyers, posting flyers through letter boxes, speaking to every breathing being that unfortunately falls within 3 feet of your own space? And heaven help you if you have a little bit of money you want to invest in lead generation – what I like to call the capital intensive approach – paying for advertisements in newspapers, magazines etc., and of course, buying leads. You buy hundreds, if not thousands, of generic opportunity leads, and then spend maybe 3-4 hours an evening, every evening, contacting them, only to recruit no-one. I remember contacting one such lead, who at the end of the phone interview asked me if they could have their television now. Heaven knows what ad or email they’d responded to, but their response certainly wasn’t from someone who was a ‘targeted’ mlm lead, despite what the lead generation company said. How many more network marketers are going to be taken in by buying untargeted mlm leads? Generating your own mlm leads is the way forward, but traditional advertising comes at a huge cost.
Pretty soon you’ve spent up, are in debt, and still you don’t have a business that’s going to fulfil your dreams or get you out of that job you so despise. You become broke, frustrated and disheartened. The next step is to quit! Now for some, that is the end of their dalliance with network marketing. Only seasoned networkers, or those with a thick skin continue to follow their dreams in one company or another, repeating the same old tired strategies. The sad truth is it wasn’t the company, the product, the line of sponsorship or the system your upline used that was the problem. It was the way the business was marketed that was, and continues to be, the issue. The even sadder thing is the approach I’ve just outlined is STILL being taught to at least 97% of networkers. Is it any wonder there is such a high attrition rate and lower duplication rates in network marketing today?
Network marketing in the twenty first century has changed. None of this traditional approach to networking works in today’s highly competitive internet age.
The good news is this hopeless situation is avoidable. There is a better way – a simple solution that instantly resolves the two major problems plaguing most home based businesses – a lack of leads and money. Using online strategies there is now a way for you to produce an endless stream of highly responsive mlm leads that are attracted to you, and you only. Once you learn the principles behind ‘attraction marketing’ you and your business will never look back. Network marketing is no longer about you promoting your company or products; it is about YOU promoting YOU as the expert. Once you grasp this simple fact, lead generation becomes easier and you have more people approaching YOU about YOUR business. Just watch your downline grow faster than you ever thought possible. It is not uncommon for networkers (even complete newbies) who use this approach to building their businesses to build a significant downline within 90 days of starting in MLM. I tell you, this approach works like magic! You’ll learn how to generate your own mlm leads without ever having to buy another lead from a lead generation company again. And if that wasn’t enough, you’ll also learn how to generate cashflow, even if your leads don’t join your primary MLM business.
Just imagine, a system where you never have to call a lead or do a face to face presentation ever again. Without doubt, a system which uses attraction marketing principles to generate mlm leads enables you to recruit prospects without fear of rejection. It is an effortless formula that allows you to create multiple streams of income on demand in your home business. The new generation of network marketing strategies is here to stay. Say goodbye to tradition and embrace the new mlm. For once, it’s the minority (3%) of networkers who aren’t wrong.
It’s time to Stop Struggling in your MLM Business – Learn how to position yourself as a leader and through attraction marketing generate more mlm leads without harassing friends and family.