The most eye opening fact of MLM is that most reps stop working. I know that doesn’t sound profound or insightful but when you consider the “WHY’s” behind this statement, some interesting truths begin to unfold. Taking into account that the great majority of reps fail, MISERABLY, I would feel compelled to look into the real reasons for this.

FOUR PHASES OF EXPANSION

1 BEGINNER MLM

If the only marketing strategy you are encouraged to use starts with a list of friends and family, you are on your way to becoming a sad statistic. The biggest lie you’ve ever heard as an MLM rep is that the best way to build your business is via warm contacts or the “The 3 foot rule”. If there is any merit to this, it’s usually because someone sponsored a rare individual- a great sales person.. But somewhere in the organization someone knows and is putting into practice something that the average rep is not aware of. Until a short time ago, those concepts remained a secret due to cost ineffectiveness and laborious marketing techniques- not teachable to the masses. Imagine your organization is thousands deep. If all your reps, in a months time, sponsored ONE person, you have had an amazing month. Do you see why your wealthiest reps are OK with a lot of you doing a little?

2 DIRECT MARKETING

The way MLMers market outside of the warm market, is always changing. A Direct Response Strategy in Network Marketing is a way of gathering leads, customers and recruits using traditional advertising methods – radio spots, newspaper ads, flyers, mailers, internet exposure, etc. Of all the traditional methods of advertising, the internet is by far the most effective. It’s economical and allows a wide range of potential clients. Most of all it is targeted. Most leverage in Network Marketing is created through a well designed Direct Response Campaign.

3 ATTRACTION MARKETING – THE REALM OF THE MASTER

Stage Three happens when people are ready to join you without any convincing or extra effort from you! In other words, you become the hunted instead of the hunter! Imagine if you had 2,3,4 or 5 people call you everyday asking “How can I join your team?” There are many thousands of people from hundreds of organizations who have taken their businesses to the next level using Attraction Marketing principles. Being a relatively new concept Phase Three is creating an Important Paradigm Shift in the way people approach their MLMs. Phase 3 is where my mentors and I are focused on and it is our goal to help others do the same. If you’re a serious MLMer, Attraction Marketing should be a part of your business arsenal.

4 THE MASTER – THE END OF THE RAINBOW

Phase four happens when YOU NEVER HAVE TO RECRUIT ANOTHER PERSON. Your business is on auto pilot with so many strong leaders that you never have to recruit a single rep again. Once again, the key to getting to phase four quickly is with a convincing internet presence via a well designed Attraction Marketing system. Your job is now about helping those who have proven themselves as leaders. At this point, you have created a true, lasting passive stream of money!

Isn’t this the dream of every Network Marketer? I believe it is. I don’t think that most of are in business to make “JOB” money. It’s the Pot Of Gold At The End Of The Rainbow. It’s about spending more time doing what YOU want. It’s about helping people you love. Success has never been more possible in Network Marketing. Seeking a Fundamentally reliable Attraction Marketing System is the Key. So, if you are a Network Marketer with big dreams I hope to see you and add value to you and you’re business on your path to success.

Are you doing the “spray and pray” method of marketing? Is your business suffering from the lack of a marketing strategy? The seven points below will have you on the road to getting your ideal clients and having a marketing plan that works for you.

Do you “Spray and Pray?” You know what I mean. Maybe you pump out an email blast to get people to sign up for your program, then create a flyer you are leaving around town, then go to a few networking events to generate some buzz….then you pray like heck that someone shows up!

What’s the problem with that? Well, for starters, if you are scattered and jumping all around with different marketing pieces, you have no idea what did or didn’t work. Remember the old days when Chrysler rolled out about three new cars a year? The whole town came out, there was a parade and it was a BIG DEAL!

Fast forward about 50 years and now we are slammed with information, new ideas/products, and constant stimulation. It’s been said that we are blasted with over three thousand marketing messages a day. So while six years ago having the newsletter you sent out was a great idea and got lots of visibility, there is now so much competing for the ‘brain space’ of your market, that very often just doing a single mailing or marketing piece will fall on deaf ears.

You may have heard it said that it takes seven to nine exposures before someone says, “Hey…maybe I’ll give him a call.” This means that one email blast is not a marketing campaign!

The antidote to “Spray and Pray” is the Plan and Persevere Method:

1. Be in it for the long haul. Marketing isn’t a one shot deal. All your content and effort is tied into everything else and builds on the relationships you are potentially creating with your market. Come up with a marketing plan so each piece you do is connected to the rest of it. This is the biggest mistake I see my clients make. At the beginning, you need to strategize and then follow the plan. If you give up after one or two marketing activities, you could be stopping just before you are going to strike gold. A good marketing plan should be attached to your calendar so you know what activities you are doing each month to attract your ideal clients and retain existing ones.

2. Don’t be invisible. In order to capture the attention of prospective clients, you need to get creative. Both direct and indirect marketing methods need to be included. Most people will rely on only one or the other. A common mistake I see is that business owners are often afraid of sending too many emails, so will pull back and only come up with a brochure and business card.

Let me say this up front….you will get some people cranky if you step up your marketing efforts. There will be unsubscribe requests to your list, but that’s okay. Good marketing also serves to repel the folks who aren’t a good fit for you, so if you are fearful of offending people, just take some deep breaths and know that you are here to serve a particular market…and the more you contact that market, the more you can support them.

Next, you will want to come up with a plan to include both direct and indirect marketing. For example….you will want to include an online ezine, blogs, and be submitting articles to the online portals, as well as mailing post cards, print newsletters, or other advertising. Those are the indirect methods. Meaning, they can’t touch you, or experience you live. Good ideas for direct methods are where people get to see or hear you, so more trust is established. It’s just a heck of a lot easier to have people believe you when they can hear your voice or see you live.

You can do either speaking engagements, teleseminars, or use video/audio in your email or website to accomplish this. Coaching challenge: You will want to pick three or four marketing ‘channels’ which your market will respond to. (You may be able to do some research to discover which ones your market prefers!)

3. Create a marketing calendar. This way you won’t be tempted to give up. Grab your planner, Outlook, or your Post-It notes -whatever you use to organize your time. Make a day each month that you will dedicate to marketing. There is the creation of your project and the implementation as well. For example, if you are going to have a newsletter sent on the 10th of the month, you may need to get your self sitting down and creating it by the 3rd of the month! And you know what I’m going to tell you, my busy business owners……….. OUTSOURCE! Don’t make the mistake of thinking you have to do it all yourself because truthfully, you can’t and you won’t! Get yourself a great assistant (either live or virtual) and have most of this stuff done for you. As Nike would say – Just Do It. You’ll thank me later.

4. Systematize or suffer. You may have heard talk about how you need to have systems in place. Well you don’t really, unless that is, you want to have insanity in its place. You get to choose! What I mean by systems is that with the newsletter example, you have a template already created, you have the format down, you have the VA or other administrative assistant primed and ready, so all you need to do is create content. No reason to reinvent the wheel. For each marketing piece you do, create a file detailing all the steps you went through. Yes, there will be more work up front, but in the end, you can hand the file off while you are sitting on a beach somewhere. That’s my hope for you!

5. Don’t guess, test! That’s the biggie in marketing. How do you know what works if you don’t test? You may need to have a “How did you find us” question, or some other way to capture that info. Test your marketing pieces on your target market, and not your husband, wife, friend or neighbor! If they aren’t your market, their opinions don’t count. There are way too many ‘dream stealers’ out there who don’t get what you do and can’t really be a good resource for your questions. Find a group of your target market and ask them if you can run by some marketing pieces with them. You can incent them with freebie stuff, but very often people LOVE to help and give their opinion. Just gotta ask.

Do research to determine what your market responds to. How do you find these???? Check out discussion boards by doing a Google search for your content ideas, or send your clients a survey. I’ll give you an example of why testing is important…One of my clients recently wanted to conduct teleseminars for her market to highlight some classes she wants to offer. She was getting advice from a speaker friend of hers in how to do this, but when we poked around a bit, we discovered that while the speakers target market would participate in teleseminars, this may be a really foreign concept to my client’s market. It would have flopped for her, so we got from her market how they best would like to receive the information.

6. Be Real or Be Broke. So many people try to ‘be professional’ that they end up being bland. It’s your quirks that make you unique! Be creative…don’t be afraid to show them who you are, and then people will know you are real and when you are real, you are approachable. Folks want real. They want to know that you have warts and wacky kids and that sometimes you may not want to get out of bed in the morning. Show them who you are and you’ll have a much better connection….and a better chance at serving them with your business.

7. Leverage the Power of Social Networking. There is a whole new game in town, and it is making your marketing much, much easier. Through the Social Media platforms of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others, you are now able to establish yourself as an expert and reach people you would never have before. If you are not on these sites, make the commitment to do so. It’s not just the college kids who are connecting here. You can just go onto Facebook and search for your market and you’ll find thousand of entries. So the first thing you’ll want to do is to get yourself out there in the virtual world, exposing your market to your expertise.

Here’s the deal – marketing isn’t really that hard, but it takes a plan and practice to get it right. If you want to be successful, you will want to begin to think like a marketer! I’m here if you need some support.

MLM is the rage on the internet today with millions of people all over the world making this form of enterprise their preferred choice for a monthly income. Some people enter multi level marketing as a part-time venture to subsidize their monthly income and some of these people like the system so much that they give up their day-job and take to MLM on a full time basis and achieve a lot of success through an MLM mailing list.

One way to get started with an MLM mailing list is to buy one from an online portal. However, there are dangers involved in this practice because not all the email addresses will be in use and you are bound to get bounce messages from the mails you send out. This is a potential dangerous situation.

To begin with just signing up for a single MLM program is not going to get you anywhere you will need at least half a dozen programs of the most popular category in order to get a sustained income. Then you will need to continuously add products to your list to get to people who you feel may need the products or services you sell. It is advisable to opt for physical products instead of an MLM that requires people to join up for a fee and recruit other affiliates under them.

Your MLM mailing list should be an opt-in list. This offers the people the choice of opting-out of your mailing list at any time with no questions asked. However, lets get back to the topic of creating your MLM mailing list.

To begin with article marketing should be high on your online marketing agenda. This requires you to research and find niche keywords that are driving traffic to your competitors sites. Use these keywords to create informative articles and post them to article directories every day. The resource box of the articles will direct your visitors to your site from there they are directed to your squeeze page. You get people to read your site through article marketing and you get quality back links to your sites that increases your chances of being indexed by the search engines.

Through article marketing you will then have to direct people to visit your site and from there try to convince them to fill in their email address into your opt-in MLM mailing list. This will only be possible if you offer some sort of an incentive for them to give up their contact information.

Article marketing involves researching the web for keywords and phrases that are driving hordes of traffic to your competitors sites. This is easy with the online tools the search engine s provide for free. Once you have your list of keywords you should begin writing articles of about 400 words each and post them to the various article directories. Your articles are listed by the search engines and people reading them are directed to your site through the resource box at the end of the article.

However, the best way to start your MLM program will be to buy a mailing list outright. There are many online portals that specialize in selling mailing lists to people who want them. However, it has been found that many of the email addresses in these commercial mailing lists bounce. So, the best way is the slow and steady way, the do it yourself way.

No matter what you are selling online, using a focused marketing strategy will yield the highest return on your time and efforts. Using a targeted marketing approach is the art of advertising only to those groups of people who are most willing to buy your product. Your target market are the people who are actually looking for your product. They are the folks who need what you have.

Here are 5 easy steps to reaching your online target market!

Identify Your Buyers. In order to plan an effective marketing strategy, you need to know who your buyers are. Who are the people who are interested in your product? The more targeted your product creation and marketing approach is, the more effective your campaign will be. For example, if you are selling information about how to get a mortgage, your target market are many different kinds of people from all over the world. You would have to create a variety of promotional materials for all the different kinds of mortgages that exist. This would be a very hard and time consuming task. But if your product focused specifically on rehabilitation mortgages, it would be safe to assume your target market would be narrowed down to investors and people wanting to fix up their primary residences. The more targeted your efforts are, the easier it will be to reach the people who want to buy your product.
Get to work on your advertising materials. Your promotional material is the backbone of your marketing efforts. It is the ad copy that intends to speak directly to your potential buyers. You want your message to be clear and appealing. Your goal is to convince them your product was designed to make their lives easier and they absolutely cannot live with it. Focus on your product’s benefits more so than it’s features. Features are nice, but your buyers are way more interested in what your product can do for them, as opposed to what your product looks like. For example, if you sell online courses about making money from home, your buyers want to know how your course can help them achieve financial freedom (benefit). The fact that your course comes in a pretty blue binder (feature) is nice, but it’s not going to make the sale.
Build Your Website. Since this is an online business you are building, a website is essential. Your customers will be those people browsing the web to find more information about your product. Remember to create your site so it speaks directly to those browsers. Remember who your buyers are, and write your content specifically for them. Try to answer all their questions, address all their concerns, and overcome any buying objections they may have. Be sure to use the right keywords on your website so the search engines will list your site in the top results when browsers type in a relevant query. For example, if you sell red widgets, make sure the keyword phrase ‘red widgets’ is in your site’s meta tags (title, keywords, and description tags), and also make use of this keyword phrase throughout your content. You can use free tools like Google’s External Keyword Tool to find out what people are searching for the most. Just type in Google External Keyword Tool into your search engine of choice and you will find this very valuable tool!
Start a blog. All websites benefit greatly from adding a blog. People love blogs! Blogs are very popular, as they provide a way for people to connect with one another. As a business owner, having a blog will give you a significant advantage over sites that don’t have one. It will give you a way to personally connect with your potential customers and build your trust with them. There are some great free blogging tools such as WordPress and Blogger where you can open up an account and start blogging right away! Check out some business blogs to find out what other business owners are blogging about.
Implement Your Marketing Campaign. Now that you have your product created, your target market identified, your promotional material written, and your website and blog live, it is time to start actively promoting your product. Some very popular marketing strategies on the web consist of opt in email marketing, social networking campaigns, social bookmarking, article marketing and press releases, etc. The possibilities are endless. No matter which advertising road you decide to take, always keep one thing in mind…always, always, always, tailor your message so it speaks directly to your target market! Good luck to you and your online success!