As a home business owner/network marketer there are “only” two things you need to master as far as skill sets go: One – Get leads. Two – convert those leads into profits.
Firstly, lead generation: 30+ quality leads per day is your first benchmark, but no need to stop there. The more, the merrier.
Whether you are using paid strategies (“direct response”) or “free” ones (content marketing and social networking) it’s essential that you hit the 30 leads/day mark ASAP.
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Whenever I do one-on-one coaching with my reps, I don’t just ask them to give me an account of how many leads they are producing daily, from which traffic sources, and at what conversion rates…
I also ask for a list of all their various websites, social media profiles and links so that I can see what they’ve got “going on” online.
You see, I have found this to be a very effective way to “take the temperature” on someone’s business.
Often a consultant will come to our coaching session with the notion that they aren’t generating enough leads, then leave 30 minutes later with the understanding that the lack of leads isn’t really their problem.
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One of the questions I was asked on yesterday’s “All Access Q&A” – a call I conduct on a regular basis for our PRO community – was whether you may contact a person who unsubscribes from your list, or if that will be considered SPAM.
The short answer is “no”, you may not contact them (perhaps there are exceptions, I don’t know, but why risk it?)…you would be violating their rights if you do, and they they may even report you… (Believe me, people are petty enough to do that.)
More importantly though – and I said this to the caller – you need to ask yourself why you want to contact someone who has let you know they are not interested.
That’s chasing. That’s approaching your business with a mindset of poverty or scarcity. That’s NOT how you build a successful, thriving business.
This is also why you need to generate massive amounts of leads. Then, you don’t get emotionally attached to the outcome.
It’s almost impossible, though, not to get emotionally attached if you aren’t producing sufficient leads!
If you’re not generating enough leads, you’ll find yourself thinking about whether a particular person is going to come in. You find yourself entertaining thoughts like, “I though he would have joined by now. He said he was going to get his start-up kit this week.”
Maybe you’re even thinking about what products they’re likely to buy, the dollar amount this is going to put in your pocket, and how this will help fund your marketing for the following month.
The problem is you haven’t even made the entry level sale yet!
Never, ever, ever, ever become emotionally attached to the outcome of a business deal. You will soon become mentally exhausted!
Not only that, but your prospects will sense your neediness. You will not come across as a professional.
So, back to my caller and her question: It’s not so much about whether she should be contacting the person who unsubscribed – the real question is, why would she want to in the first place?
The person is not interested, for crying out loud!
My caller should be focusing her time and energy on driving more traffic. Much more traffic! 30, 50, 100+ leads a day.
Leads are just leads. They put in their name and email on your website…so what? There’s no commitment from a lead. 95% of your prospects will never join you in your primary business anyway. (Yup, those are the industry stats.)
And that’s exactly why you need heaps and heaps and heaps of leads.
See, when you have consistent traffic flow, and you’ve worked out your metrics, and you know how to close sales and upgrade your distributors, it doesn’t concern you AT ALL that people unsubscribe from your list.
You know it’s just a sorting process anyway, and you’re working your business with a mindset of abundance rather than scarcity: You know there’s no lack of qualified prospects.
You’re not trying to please everyone – you’re just looking for a few select individuals. The right individuals.
When you convey this through your marketing, and on the phone with people, you come across as that leader your prospects are looking for. And they sign up with you, because everyone’s looking for a leader (Attraction Marketing 101).
Becoming a successful marketer is about two things: 1. Developing the skill set of driving and converting traffic, and 2. Developing the mindset of a leader.
That’s “all” there’s to it.
Successfully,
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PS: Agree? Disagree? Feel free to re-tweet this post and/or to leave me a comment below!
I recently conducted a Q&A call for PRO, the online community of entrepreneurs that I belong to, and one of the new members asked if I could post something on my blog about marketing budgets vs. strategies.
So here we go – here are my recommendations:
$500 – $1000+ /month: Primary strategy for traffic generation is direct response: Google or Bing, even Twitter or Youtube Pay-per-click (not to be confused with social networking on these same platforms). Set out to become a master at one direct response strategy.
Combine this with content marketing (articles, blog posts, press releases): Content marketing will help build trust and credibility for you with your prospects, and thus, help turn traffic and leads into sales and profits.
Depending on how much time you are going to be able to invest into your business and where your strengths are, I would consider outsourcing some if not all of your content marketing.
This doesn’t have to be expensive by the way – use Odesk.com, Guru.com or the Warrior Forum. These all have some very reasonable outsourcing options.
$100 – $500 /month: There are a couple of different schools of thought on what is the best way to spend a smaller startup budget… One has it you should always invest it in direct response – for two reasons:
1. You learn best in the trenches – even if you don’t generate any profits at first, your skill set will improve…and
2. It is very possible that you’ll be able to generate some traffic even with a limited marketing budget, get a sale or two, and now, suddenly you are in profit and have money you can reinvest into your marketing…and then you just continue to build this way…
The other school of thought says that if you don’t have a decent marketing budget to spend on pay per click, it’s better to hold off, or you’ll simply find yourself starting something that you won’t be able to keep up if your limited marketing budget doesn’t produce any sales for you…
Because when that money is gone, it’s gone.
Better to invest your limited marketing funds into content marketing, they say: get as many keyword targeted articles and press releases outsourced and published as you possible can. Do a bunch of videos.
When you run out of money, that content will still remain on the world wide web, help build your online presence and likely also produce traffic for you over time.
(My personal note: The downside is that content marketing is nothing like direct response when it comes to producing massive amounts of traffic quickly and consistently. Whereas direct response traffic flows, content traffic comes in sprinkles and trickles.)
$0-$100 / month: If you are on a shoestring budget, you are going to have to focus on “free” content marketing for a while.
(I put “free” in quotation marks because there really isn’t such a thing as “free traffic”: What you lack in andvertising funds, you will have to make up for in time…and seriously, what is more valuable than your time?)
As soon as you have generated some profits through these “free” methods, you’ll want to put what you earned right back into your marketing budget.
I tell my new consultants that for the first 90-180 days they should be prepared to put 100% of what they make right back into their business…yes, on top of their existing marketing budget.
And that’s regardless of whether they are starting out with free or paid strategies.
You see, one of the worst mistakes you can make as a new marketer, is to lose momentum. It’s always bad to lose momentum but it’s especially bad in the beginning.
You don’t want to get started and then have to stop because you didn’t plan ahead properly and ran out of marketing funds – that’s a mistake a lot of new marketers make.
I strongly recommend that you plan your advertising budget for the next six months.
Ask yourself, “what can I commit to spending per month over the next six months…money that I have coming in from other sources, not profits from my business (since I don’t know how quickly these will be coming in) but other funding. Funding I can rely on 100% for my marketing, and which will go toward building my business no matter what…?”
It’s no different than paying your mortgage or your car insurance every month. The money is there because it has to be. It’s in your budget; it’s a necessity.
That’s how you want to look at the funding of your business, too. Even if the amount you can spend in the beginning is very small.
Hope this helps!
Successfully,
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PS: If you enjoyed this post, feel free to re-tweet it and/or to leave me a comment below!
Here are some simple, tried-and-true tips that can help you boost your results in 2011. They are based on a list I put together for my own team members recently, but I modified it slightly and posted it here, hoping it could benefit others as well.
These ideas all spring from my own experiences of what has made the greatest difference in my success as an Internet marketer.
I recommended you pick a handful of them and start implementing them in your business today. Let me know which ones you commit to: feel free to leave me a comment below!
1. Connect with two or three people on your team or perhaps in some online networking community that you belong to: touch base often, hold each other accountable. Staying in close connection with other like-minded individuals can make ALL the difference during challenging times in your business.
2. Plan your marketing budget (however big or small) for the next 6 months and stick with it no matter what: What are you going to be spending on your marketing per month for the next 6 months to build your business to momentum?
This marketing budget is not based on whether or not you make sales in your business – it’s funding coming from other income sources. But any profits your make in your business should be added to this budget.
3. Opt in to the email list of one or two successful leaders in the industry that you feel you resonate with: Follow them closely, see how they market themselves as leaders, and model yourself after them (-model, not copy).
4. Bookmark CopyBlogger.com and use it whenever you need inspiration for headlines, subject lines for emails, and other copy. It’s free, and it’s a fabulous place to start learning some basic copy writing.
5. Mark your calendar for your company’s next marketing event and commit to being there. There is simply no substitute for live events, and you can’t even begin to grasp what I mean until you actually attend one. You come back as a changed person, and when you change, your business changes.
6. Add one more hour to your workday: That’s six extra hours a week; 24 extra hours per month. Then, ask yourself what sacrifices you need to make in order for this to happen.
7. Become more deliberate about how you spend your time: Plan your weekly schedule – I recommend using an online calendar and writing down specifically what you will be working on each and every day of the week, blocking out 1,2 or 3 hour blocks of time.
8. Become more consistent about “working your list”, using promos, free offers & bonuses, conducting online webinars for your subscribers, etc, as a way of giving value, building trust & credibility and prompting your prospects to take action more quickly.
9. Learn to leverage & recycle all your content: Here is a youtube video I did where I explain how to do this.
10. Start personalizing your email auto responders. You’ll find some helpful training tutorials for this as well on my youtube channel.
11. Pick one direct response marketing strategy and master it to perfection: focus on that one strategy only; learn everything there is to learn about it.
12. Unsubscribe to all those email lists that you never should have gotten on in the first place, which are doing nothing but filling up your inbox.
13. Start calling your leads. NOT calling your leads is a right you have to earn, and unless you’re generating 30 or more leads a day consistently and/or making $10K a month, you haven’t earned that right yet.
14. Commit to doing keyword research for everything you write and publish: if you aren’t using keywords properly in all your online marketing, you are going to get buried in the Internet graveyard where no one will find you.
15. Become crystal clear on your “why”. Why do you do what you do? Where are you going? If you don’t know where you are going, why would anyone else want to follow you?
16. Every day, focus on profit producing activities. There are only 2 of them: Marketing, and talking to people. In other words, driving and converting traffic.
17. Consider getting a screen capture software such as Camtasia, and start shooting video tutorials where you teach and train on specific marketing strategies.
Post these to your youtube channel, and also, use a video distribution tool such as Traffic Geyser to blast your videos all over the net. Video tutorials are incredibly effective in attracting high quality prospects. They make you look like an expert in the eyes of your viewers, too. ;-)
18. It is never too soon to start creating your own unique offer: an ebook, a video series, a live webinar course, a pdf file or another type of report… There’s probably nothing more powerful you can do as a marketer in order to establish yourself as an authority and to build your brand.
Plus, with your own offer 100% of the profits go back into your pocket!
19. Become consistent about tracking your traffic. Because how can you know what marketing strategies are working for you if you don’t know what traffic sources are producing for you and which are not?
20. Consider outsourcing some of your work: Use odesk.com, guru.com, or the warriorforum, to hire some helping hands – whether it is to write articles, create banners, build a blog, or whatever.
Outsourcing – which does not have to be expensive by the way – can be a life line during those times when you feel especially overwhelmed. As a wise person said, “Do what you do best, then outsource the rest.”
PS: Let me know about your progress… Perhaps you have already implemented one or more of these strategies and have seen a big difference in your business and your life? If so, be sure to leave me a comment right below! Also, as always, if you think this post can be of help to others, feel free to retweet it.
Successfully,
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If you’ve subscribed to receive email updates from me, and you have “replied” to one of my emails – perhaps with a question or a comment – you know that my email account is set up to deliver an “vacation reply”.
And, if you are receiving information from me via email, you also know that if you want to talk to me – if you want to get me on the phone – you are asked to submit an application first.
Why?! Do I think I’m that important? Am I just a snob?
Or…is there perhaps a different reason?
The video below seeks to answer that question.
Recommended: As soon as the video starts to play, point your curser in the bottom right hand corner and click on the little icon you’ll see there that looks like a video screen. This will open the video in “full-screen” mode.
Successfully,
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I remember how some years back — I was working a traditional MLM business at the time — I heard a fellow distributor recount his activities for the day on a team call (a daily routine instituted by the leadership to further accountability)….
I remember how taken aback I was to hear how this particular distributor – let’s call him Nick – had gotten into talking with a lead he called for the purpose of getting a product sample out to the person, and that the chat had (get this) turned into a 1 hour long dialogue…
A conversation about sports and travels, and goodness knows what else — anything BUT Nick’s business or products. As the phone call came to a close, the prospect agreed to take the sample pack, but, as Nick himself admitted to us, the guy likely did it only because he felt he owed it to Nick after taking so much of his time.
Even Nick realized how completely wasted that hour was. He could have made ten other calls to prospects during that time and gotten a whole bunch of sample packs out. Instead — thinking that if he just did a real good job of befriending the guy, he would want the product — he got caught in a conversational trap he couldn’t get out of.
And…yes, you guessed it…in spite of Nick’s unsurpassed amicability, they prospect did NOT become a paying customer.
This was a few years back, and I’ve since made the transition to online marketing. Now, as Internet marketers we don’t dial for dollars, and so we don’t need to worry about getting stuck with prospects who aren’t right for our business. Or do we…?
Well. Just because we do a large part of our marketing online and spend less time on the phone, it doesn’t make us immune to vampires of our time.
And social networking sites can be dangerous that way: You log onto a place like Facebook to check your messages for a few minutes, and lo and behold, “pop” – that tiny pop-up window appears, and one of your many (way too many) Facebook “friends” demands your attention.
You don’t want to be rude to your “friend”, so you politely reply…and before you know it you’re dialoging about the weather, about what an amazing movie Avatar was, and about whether Tiger Woods deserves a second chance.
You may even be sharing ideas about marketing, crossing your fingers and hoping the dialogue will lead the other person to ask you about your business so that you can direct them to your website…
But, of course, nine out of ten times that doesn’t happen.
Don’t get me wrong…I love social networking. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkdIn…all are powerful marketing tools for us online entrepreneurs — if used correctly.
Five minutes here and five minutes there…before you know it, you’ve spent an hour in unproductive dialogue. And just like Nick could have spent his hour getting bunches of sample packs out, you could have spent your hour, too, on REVENUE producing activities.
So what are revenue producing activities? Two things: marketing and talking to people. Which means that if you are engaging in conversations with people online, you are in fact doing something right!
You’ve just got to make sure you get your message across to as many individuals in your target market as possible, all at once, and don’t get sucked into lengthy discussions one-on-one with people who may or may not be looking for what you have to offer.
In all your marketing, be it pay-per-click, article marketing, social media marketing, or anything else that you use to drive traffic to your websites — you’ve got to think VIRAL.
Fortunately for us Internet marketers, there’s a whole bunch of tools we can use for that purpose: automated Twitter tools, video distribution tools, article submission software, and the list goes on.
Think MASS communication. Successful marketing has always been and always will be about numbers. And social media marketing is no different.
Successfully,
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