Today I am very proud and pleased to introduce a good friend and I have really liked her information that she shares with others so freely. Not only is her writing style superb, but her knowledge is one to be recognized. On this day I want to say thank you
Stella Anokam
and you can always find her on Facebook, and if you're not her friend you should be. She is an awesome person and I am very happy that she accepted my invitation to be a guest writer on my blog. Thank you Stella and I appreciate your time and effort you put into writing this brilliant article for my readers. Much love to you my friend.
First the purpose of this post is to dissuade Network Marketers from continually using
effort-driven marketing strategies that push prospects far away from you, most of which are old school marketing methods that revolve around friending people with an agenda to immediately market your business opportunity to them, as soon as they respond to you.
These kind of marketing are so time consuming and require too much efforts especially as it’s focused on one person at a time and in some cases require you to go virtually door to door, malls to malls, looking for new prospects. Most of all, that kind of marketing is getting less effective by the day.
I’m not saying that they do not work. Yes, but you’ll get small results compared to your efforts PLUS you’ll succeed at repelling many people who will see you as desperately pushy. They also cost money – phone calls, commuting etc. Sometimes, people get broke and quit before ever breaking even – hence they start telling everyone who cares to listen that MLM does not work or MLM is scam.
What if you knew a better way of marketing that puts every single message in front of a mass of people? Less work, less efforts AND massive results = More Leads generated.
Yes, I’m talking of online prospecting using blogging.
The 5 Things You Need to Go from Offline Prospecting to Online Prospecting
Strategy #1: Have an e-Office / Contact Spot
This is your own blog or website. NOT that one given to your by your network marketing company. NO. You don’t have control over what contents or adverts to put up on your company website BECAUSE you are a tenant.
Just in case you are building on little or no budget, you can build your own blog for free.
Having a blog enables you to mass market to many people, with every single marketing message or training – which means a likelihood to generate more leads with less efforts.
Once you have your own website, you will use social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as promotion points to funnel prospects back to your main website. And when they get to your website, they can opt in to your list where you will have wider access to them.
Are you beginning to see how to use a website PLUS Facebook/ Twitter. If you sue Facebook alone to market, your message only gets to a prospect once – no way for you to tell them again and again.
How does having a website lead to building trust, you may ask? On your website, you will have:
-Testimonials on your sidebar, for every new visitor to see
-Comments on posts, with some commenters comments giving off some familiarity with you. That makes a visitor think, “if they know him/her so well, I should be safe joining his/her business”
There are 2 options, when starting a website:
a. Free websites/ blogging platforms where you get a website name such as www.mywebsite.wordpress.com. If you must use a free blogging platform, I recommend Blogger.Com.
b. Paid Hosting using Wordpress.Org where you get a website name like www.mywebsite.com. If you can afford some small budget, self-hosting your own blog is really low – between $5 and $7 monthly AND you get a good discount if you pay for a year upfront.
Hostgator is one of the best hosting service that most MLM bloggers are using and I highly recommend it.
The main difference is that with the paid hosting, you’re the landlord and can put up any kind of marketing content or advert you like – no one will boot you out BUT with the free websites, you have restrictions on what kind of contents and adverts to put up ELSE you risk losing the website without warning.
Now that you know, the choice is yours. For more details on both website types and how to create your own MLM website from scratch, and by yourself, you can visit my website at the link below:
SEO Keyword Placement
Strategy #2: Get Them In the Door With Useful, Educational Contents
After setting up a blog, you will need to write useful, MLM educational contents on your blog. Use our contents to answer some Frequently Asked Questions, debunk some MLM myths and provide MLM educational information.
Next is to drive traffic of people to that blog. Social media and social networking sites are great at putting your blog contents in front of many people.
Strategy #3: Setup Social Media Pages to Match Your Website Name/ Brand
I see a lot of Network Marketers pitching hard on Facebook and Twitter. This is a REPULSIVE and ineffective marketing. No one will trust you because you do not have a contact point where they can check you out.
Social media and social networking sites are not a replacement for your blog. You need a main place where you are the landlord – your own blog. As I said above, use social media and social networking sites to strategically funnel visitors to your site, from the social media sites. Use social media site to tweet your own blog posts and other good posts by other MLM bloggers, you think will benefit your followers. Don’t forget to engage with other people (those you follow and those following you).
Be careful to spread yourself too wide because there are many social media sites. Go with the big ones as they give bigger results. I recommend you start with Facebook and Twitter. Ensure to setup social media accounts to match your MLM blog name.
Strategy #4: Catch them and Keep them (using an Email Marketing system)
Email Marketing Tools:
An autoresponder
Optin Box on Blog
A Lead Capture Page + A freebie (eBook, report, video, anything that your target prospect needs badly enough to drop their email address to get it from you)
PURPOSE: Often when people hear about a business opportunity, they research about it (on the internet and also ask trusted friends and family) to get more educated. Then they look for uplines in that business who can offer them extra free leverage for rapid success – such as teaching them success strategies.
Blogging allows you to position yourself as that person with the right, needed information. It also allows you to easily be found when people search for information from independent people with no ulterior motives.
People do not join your business the first time they learn/ hear about it – they may be sceptical or want more education about it AND if you lose them that time, they may receive more information from your competitor and join his/ her business opportunity when they are ready.
Getting their contact via email address enables you to build trust and provide more information and value to them, from time to time, so that you’ll be there and be the most preferred person they want to join, when they are ready.
An autoresponder such as Aweber, is a time saving and productivity tool that will enable you to create emails in advance so that the same emails are served to every new subscriber, as if you were creating them in real time.
Strategy #5: Never, Never Pitch. Add Value First, Build Trust and Credibility Before Pitching
Do Not Rush Your Prospect. First give them what thy want and they will be more receptive to listening to you. Doing that also gives you an opportunity to sell yourself first (before your business). Yes, people buy trusted brands but from TRUSTED sources.
If you first sell your brand (You Inc) to them:
-You can guage their responses and readiness to be pitched, so that with right timing, you will usually close the sales whenever you market your business;
-You can sell ANYTHING to them later (your business and other stuff), which increases your income stream;
-They’ll perceive you as an expert and will trust you enough to refer others to you because they believe you will not pitch BUT enrich the person (more referrals = more free advertising);
-Ultimately, prospects will start coming to you INSTEAD of the traditional approach of you always chasing them and they always running from you;
You may be wondering “when is the best time to talk about your MLM business opportunity?”. The best time is after a prospect has become a subscriber and after a few useful emails to them.
When they become your subscriber, you can decide to send them one promotional email (about your business) after every 10 or 15 educational emails OR once a month OR roughly, 20% promotional emails and 80% useful emails every month. This is just a guide.
Author BIO:
Stella Anokam is a marketing strategist who shares tons of offline
to online marketing strategies to help Network Marketers learn simplified, no techie methods of using blogging and social media to generate up to 100 new prospects daily. Don’t forget to get a Free copy of Stella’s Step
by Step Blueprint for Beginning to Blog for Prospects
