Network marketing and affiliate marketing online

Archive for September, 2010

Are You Following Up With Your Network Marketing Prospects?

Sep 29

Posted by Wayne Woodworth in Network Marketing | No Comments

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

You’ve probably heard before that it is important to follow-up with your prospects. The people who contact you or that you contact about your network marketing business, or the products, aren’t likely to take a lot of action after the first time that you talk. Therefore it is absolutely essential that you check back with them periodically to keep them moving forward.

I have read that studies have shown that 82% of sales are made on or after the third contact and other experts say that your customers need to see your offer seven time or more before they will act. That’s a big part of what makes direct mail so expensive.

Fortunately, there is a better and far less expensive way to follow up with your customers if your business is online. You can set up an email series with an autoresponder so that your prospect or customer receives a new message from you on a regular basis. This way your customers start to recognize your name and you can build a relationship with them by offering valuable content.

To use an autoresponder you will need to create an account with one, setup your email series, and create a form to put on your website for your customers to use to sign up. I know it sounds complicated, but other than actually writing the emails it is pretty much all done for you. There are several autoresponder services available on the internet and I use Aweber, which has worked very well for me.

I have two examples of how I’m using Aweber to keep in touch with my prospects and customers. First, the customers for my MLM company’s products can sign up for a free monthly newsletter in the right sidebar of my product page at www.getmywellness.com. The second example is for people interested in learning more about my network marketing business opportunity on my Work with Wayne page.

Are you using an autoresponder to follow up with your customers? What kind of content are your offering them through your autoresponder and how well is that working? Let me know in a comment below. I would also appreciate it if you would share this with your followers on the social networks too.

Wayne Woodworth

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Network Marketing vs. A “Real” Job

Sep 22

Posted by Wayne Woodworth in Network Marketing | No Comments

There are a lot of people who are unemployed and looking for a job right now, so how does network marketing compare to a “real” job?

Benefits of a “Real” Job

First, what is a job? In my opinion a job is where you give up your freedom in exchange for the illusion of security. When you have a job you show up when you are told, do what you are told, take lunch when you are told, return to work when your are told, do more of what you are told, then go home when you are told. The next day you get to do more of the same. Every day is pretty much the same and you usually have to drive through bad traffic full of everyone else looking forward to the same thing.

What do you get for doing all of that? You get a fixed paycheck. If you help the business make more money, you still get the same amount. If you don’t help the company make more money you probably get laid off. If the company makes less money for reasons out of your control you might get laid off too.

There are certain perks that go along with a job. You get the occasional day off as long as you don’t exceed your allotment and it doesn’t inconvenience the company too much. You might get health benefits, but in a lot of cases they are being reduced as the group plans get priced out of reach for  your employer. The nice thing about group plans for people who are sick a lot is that the healthy people help to cover some of your medical costs.

Your job may be a little more interesting than that sounds, but basically that’s what you get to look forward to with a job.

Benefits of a Network Marketing Business

When you build your own network marketing as a career you set your own hours. You start as early or late as you want to and you finish as early or late as you want. You have lunch when you want, and if you need time off for something then you can just take it. I know that sounds great, but you do have to make sure that you do the work necessary to make money. The difference here is that you are the boss, so you have to have the self-discipline to do what you need to do to make your business successful.

And what do you get for that? Your income is directly tied to the money making activity that you do. If you help your network marketing team make more money, then you get a larger paycheck. Likewise, if your team brings in less money then you get a smaller paycheck. You are in control of your income. If you want to make more money then you know what you need to do.

Which is Right for You?

So, which is right for you? Do you need the structure of someone telling you what to do everyday? Some people need that structure and if that is you, then by all means get a job. If you are a motivated self-starter with the discipline to keep yourself on task, then network marketing might be right for you and I would like to talk to you about being business partners.

Which is right for you? Let me know why in a comment below. I also want to thank you for sharing this post with your followers on the social networks.

Wayne Woodworth

Tags: , , , ,

Why Is There A Low Network Marketing Success Rate?

Sep 10

Posted by Wayne Woodworth in Network Marketing | No Comments

I think there are two reasons why network marketing has a low success rate. One is that people aren’t taught to treat it like a real business and the other is that they are taught a very difficult way to do it.

Network Marketing Business

It is important to treat your network marketing business as a real business if you want to be successful and make some real income. Most people treat it as a hobby and, I don’t know if this is true for you or not, but I’ve never made very much money from my hobbies. To build a successful network marketing business you will have to devote time to it on a consistent basis.

One thing that works for me is to create a to-do list. I have two actually, a daily to-do list of things that I do every day to keep my business on track, and a running to-do list of all the other things that need to get done. Your daily list needs to be small enough that you can get it done in a couple hours so that you have time for everything else.

My running to-do list grows faster than I complete things on it, so prioritizing the items is required so that the most important tasks get done first. The highest priority tasks should be the things that will give your business the biggest benefit for the amount of time that they take to accomplish.

I start my day off by knocking out the items on my daily to-do list as quick as I can, usually in an hour to two. Then if I have time left, I pick the most important task that I can complete before I have to break to take my kids to school. It may not be the most important task because I don’t want to start something that I cannot complete, or at least get to a good stopping point. Once I get back home I go after the most important thing on my to-do list.

How to Make Network Marketing Work

The second problem with network marketing is how people are taught to do it. I know you’ve heard it before. When you start out your are told to make a list of 100 people that you know who you would like to work with. You start with friends and family then add your doctor, your dentist, kid’s piano teacher, and your mailman until you get 100 people. That’s a challenging way to build a business. I’m really! Are you seriously going to ask your mailman to join your network marketing business and actually expect him (or her) to join?

Everybody is different. Some people will actually do very well with the “list method”. They are the people who have been in network marketing for 10 years and have a huge list full of business contacts with solid experience in network marketing. You can be sure that they have a lot more than 100 people on their list and you will have scored big if you can land one of these people on your team.

I have a friend in my network marketing company (wish he was on my team) who does very well with cold-calling. He says that he could sell ice to an eskimo and I’m sure he could. So cold calling is what he has been teaching his team so far but he knows it isn’t for everyone. He has been helping me prototype a training program to teach my way of building the business.

My method is to first sell product online to build retail profit first then build a team second. I use a blog and social media to generate traffic and product sales and it has been very successful. Once a new teammate has money coming in then they can shift to prospecting online for leads. My goal is to build a team that moves a lot of product volume because moving product is where the money is in network marketing.

The point here is that not everybody is the same and not everybody will do well with the same network marketing strategy. Build a team of people with different skills or create an alliance with other people in your network marketing company who can train your new people in the different strategies. This way you open up your business to a variety of people and everyone shares in the success.

I know this was a long post but I hope you received some value from it. What network marketing strategy works well for you? Let me know in a comment below then use the buttons at the top of this post or below to share it with your followers on the social networks.

Wayne Woodworth

Tags: , , , , , ,

Internet Network Marketing Tips to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

Sep 2

Posted by Wayne Woodworth in Network Marketing | 4 Comments

Today I want to offer you some internet network marketing tips that you can use to build your online network marketing business. I firmly believe in using a blog to build my business online. In addition to writing content that your readers want to read, you need to make it easy for readers to find you.

Where to Build Your Blog

Where you blog is hosted is important. The free services, like Blogger.com and WordPress.com are not the best places to establish your blog because those services have too much control over your blog. If they don’t like your content then they can shut your blog down. Your best best is to get a hosting account, register your own URL, and install WordPress. That is a whole lot easier than it sounds. I use HostMonster and they step you through the process. Installing WordPress there is just a matter of clicking the icon and filling in the blanks.

Search Engine Optimization

Most of my traffic comes from the search engines, so search engine optimization is important. People like to make SEO sound really hard, but it isn’t. There are a handful of easy-to-use plugins available for WordPress that help you take care of it. The All in One SEO Pack is probably the most important one that I use on my blog because it allows me to set the description and keywords for the search engines on each post.

The keywords you choose are important. Think about the keywords that your readers might use to find the information that you are writing about and make sure that you use those word in your posts, add them as tags, and include them in the keywords field in the All in One SEO Pack section. There are many research tools available to help you find more keywords for your post. One easy thing is to start typing your keyword into Google Search and see what other phrases get listed in the box as you type.

Social Networks

The social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are valuable for promoting your blog in two ways. They help your search engine optimization because you can add a link to your blog on your profile. The search engines look for links to your blog from other sites to help determine how to rank your blog. Because of that it is a good idea to register and set up a profile on the social networks even though you may not use it regularly.

The second, and more immediate, value of the social networks is in advertising your blog posts. I have my blog set up to automatically tweet the title of my post to Twitter every time I publish new content. Then all of my followers on Twitter know about my new post and can come read it. The Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress does that for me.

I also use the Networked Blogs application on Facebook to publish my new post to my wall on Facebook and my LinkedIn account automatically pulls my tweets from Twitter so that my new post shows up there as well.

These are the basics that I use to get traffic to my internet network marketing blog every day and it works. If you have a tip that you use to help get traffic to your blog then please tell me about it in a comment below. Also, please share this out with your followers on the social sites.

Wayne Woodworth

Tags: , , , , ,