There is something very powerful about helping other people and that’s why I like the Network Marketing industry. If only you could access a mentor listing using Google. Network marketing offers the average person the opportunity to establish their own business with little or no investment, then it offers them the training they need to accomplish it. Even more importantly it offers people the experience, insight, encouragement and help of other people who have already succeeded…mentors. To me mentoring others is the single most gratifying aspect of this industry. By mentoring new business owners and entrepreneurs I feel that I am paying back some of the great mentoring I received early on as well.
My first mentor was the man who sponsored me into network marketing. It was through his encouragement and due to my respect for him that I even considered a network marketing business opportunity. I objected vehemently at his suggestion that I join network marketing because I was not going to sell. He quietly spoke from experience and said, “It’s really a lot less about selling than you think, and if you go to the meeting with me, you’ll see a room full of people who are motivated to help you succeed. Will you just keep an open mind and go with me to the meeting?” That’s what it took. And that was my first mentoring lesson. Because helping someone their shift their mindset like that is true mentoring.
Overcoming fears is another area for mentoring. I remember my fear of contacting leads. Another mentor had me come to his office and we talked for a few minutes about the goal of the call. Now it was a goal, not an embarrassment. Then he went over a very simple few sentences he thought conveyed my intent and told me to just say that. Now it was a task of remembering the sentences and saying them. Hmm. Once I removed these calls from a predisposition of fear and placed them in a task and objective mindset, I was able to make the calls. Helping someone overcome fear and take action is true mentoring.
Coaching, explaining, encouraging…all mentoring. Helping someone diagnose why they have failed so they can learn and improve? Mentoring. Holding someone accountable for the objectives they set themselves? Again mentoring. Imparting solid, hard-earned business, marketing, psychological, communications and personal advice? You guessed it. Mentoring.
There is an expression in network marketing that I find true. You are in business by yourself, but you don’t have to be alone. And that refers significantly to mentoring and really defines the true network marketing experience and mindset. I hope you appreciate the mentors you have had in life as I do. Access to a strong, experienced business person as a mentor is probably one of the most important reasons for joining a business.
The best way to do network marketing online is to build rapport and establish a relationship with people BEFORE making your business offer. I call this process rapport leadership, and it dramatically increases your success rates. As part of this acquaintance process you will screen or filter out people who are not interested in having a business of their own or growing their income. This requires some degree of conversation; just like getting to know someone in person.
To find leads you use social networking, blogging and videos to introduce yourself and your view on the world (this is called your “personal brand”), and to offer valuable information that your viewers want or need. Some people call this “attraction marketing”. You also offer them additional information or value via email or download if they will provide you with their name and email address contact information. This is called “lead capturing.”
Next it is time to add more value in order to build the relationship. I like to send daily or semi-weekly email letters or newsletters. These frequent communications provide further information and insights into the topics the leads were attracted to in the first place. This provides your viewers a chance to get to know you more naturally, over a period of time. Because you are offering more and more value, they will continue reading or viewing your communications. This will further deepen their trust levels.
After you have provided several installations of added value it is time to offer your leads the opportunity to learn about your business opportunity. This way when they view your opportunity it will be with a more open and receptive mind. At this point they will be so comfortable with you that they may even opt to call you and ask for further information. This is also a good point for you to collect their phone number and call them. What you will find is that they will be glad to talk to you because by now they will feel like they practically know you.
Rapport leadership is how successful Online Marketers do network marketing on the Internet. As you can see it is really a natural process of getting to know people, building trust and confidence, and sharing advice, experience and opportunities. Incidentally, whether your leads chose your opportunity or not, you will make friends, and to me, that’s the most valuable possession in the world. You can’t lose by doing Network Marketing on the Internet. Good luck!
Subscribing To A Marketing Systems: Take The Headaches Out Of Becoming An Online Marketer
If you’re like I was, the prospect of becoming an Online Marketer may seem formidable right now. Before beginning your start-up online home business, you might be asking questions like, ‘exactly what do I need to know how to do’, and ‘I don’t know anything about building web pages, how can I ever do this?’ Well, sure it’s a learning curve, but you can do it. After all, I did it and I didn’t know much about it when I started either. Let me give you this piece of encouragement; you can do this, you can become an Online Marketer, and you can become a success at it. The power is in you. Now, let me give you a few more thoughts that might ease your mind.
Let’s start with the web pages. The good news is you’ll learn how to create them, and the really good news is that there are marketing systems available which will do it for you until you do learn! The fact is, when you’re starting you’re going to have a lot to learn in a hurry, so it’s a good idea to leverage yourself by subscribing to a marketing system. There are a number of them out there, for instance there is the Carbon Copy PRO system, the MLM Mastermind System and the MLM Lead System PRO, just to name a few. The nice thing about these systems is that they each provide you with landing pages, sales pages and product pages to help you market your business, so you don’t have to know any HTML or do any programming. And to varying degrees they provide you with the all-important content letters to load into your automatic email response system (auto responder). Costs for these are moderate, ranging from approximately $47 per month to $147 per month, each with a reasonable start-up fee.
Getting started you’re going to need to get hooked into some good training. Here’s the next great piece of news for you, the systems I mentioned above each offer great training, mostly in video, to help you implement your first and subsequent marketing campaigns online. With the exception of key reference books you’ll probably want, your initial training needs to be what’s contained within the systems, and it’s quite significant! And here’s the really good news about training. The training is free if you subscribe to the system! If you were purchasing the training I’d guess that you’d pay at least $1,000 to $1,500 for it. But for free? How much better can it get?
So my message to you is that you can be an Online Marketer. You can learn what you need to learn as you go, and you can be a successful Online Marketer. My recommendation to you is that you consider subscribing to a marketing system to get you going. You’ll get free landing pages, sales pages, product pages, and auto responder content. Oh, here’s the last piece of good news. Because you can start while you learn, your marketing can begin earning you money while you earn, probably more than you’ll be paying for the cost of the system, auto responder and other marketing costs you incur. What could be better? What you really need to do is make up your mind to get started and stick with it . . . never quit, that’s the real secret! Good luck!
We all see information on the Internet about marketing your products, which is a key element of success for your business. But there are other elements which are quite necessary for your success as well. Today I’d like to address one of those that every new home business faces, and that is how you plan to manage and account for money in your business.
Every successful business is going to have to handle and manage money. If you don’t, you are not going to be successful for long. I use the term “money” because we’re not specifically talking about receivables, payables, revenue and expenses; just money. I’d like you to consider three aspects of managing your money: collecting and distributing money, providing for securing money, and providing for tracking and reporting of your money. Money is a very complicated topic; after all the professions of Accounting and Finance exist to help businesses manage money and resources. So doesn’t it make sense that in your home business you give the element of money some well-deserved planning and attention?
As a home business owner and Online Marketer, what provisions have you made for collecting and distributing money? Certainly for very large transactions you can arrange for electronic transfer of funds. But for most transactions people are going to want a simple and convenient way to pay you. Probably the simplest method is to take Pay Pal. Pay Pal handles all the details. All you have to do is set up an account. You can take checks, but that might prove too slow. Besides, people generally prefer to use credit cards. An advantage of taking credit cards is that this should instantly add credibility to your home-based business. But in order to accept credit cards, you must first apply for a Merchant Account. There are a number of companies offering Merchant Accounts, possibly even your bank, but these accounts are not automatically approved, so you will have to apply for one and possibly demonstrate good credit.
Also you will need some sort of accounting system for tracking, distributing, and monitoring money. My accountant recommended QuickBooksPRO. But there are other systems like Microsoft Office Accounting Express. Also there is Quicken. Microsoft Money is being taken off the market, so that won’t be an option for you anymore. The point is, you need a way to track your monetary transactions and to report and monitor for solid business reasons and for tax purposes. My best advice is to meet with a CPA and discuss the best course of action.
Finally your CPA will undoubtedly recommend that you set up a separate business account at your bank so you do not mix your personal and business transactions and funds. This can be done at any bank, so I recommend you find one that is close and offers good account terms. Go in and meet the business account manager. Make sure he or she knows what kind of business you are in and what you hope to do with it. A banker can be a good friend to a Home-Business Owner.
We’ve only scratched the surface of the important elements of business that you need to be planning and managing. Marketing is still very important, 80 percent of what you must do every day. But these other elements of business like money management must also have your attention if you are going to be a success.
Once you start a business, you’ve got to find out what motivates you. What nourishes your inner strength and keeps you striving for success? Your motivations are your own, you own them. They are strictly built into your wiring. But you may not know what your motivations are or how to use them to drive you to success. Here are few steps to help you discover out what motivates you and to help you use your motivation to succeed in your home business.
Step 1: Discover Your Motivation. Some people say that they are motivated by money. I don’t think so. I think that money is only a stepping stone to achieving something that motivates them. For instance, prestige. Wealthy people have prestige and it’s something that can motivate a person to achieve. Also helping others. Some people really motivated to help others and money is something they can use to help others get what they need. Of course there are the necessities of life. We all need money to pay for food, shelter, clothing, transportation and education. Money can help us achieve that as well. Then there are motivators like self-satisfaction through achievement, self-satisfaction through depending on yourself for your own needs.
Step 2: Make A Dream Board. Once you have identified your motivation, it’s time to put it to work for you. I like the idea of a Dream Board. If you’re unfamiliar with a dream board, it’s a great tool to help you remain focused on your motivation to success in your business. In a dream board you visually portray your dreams, or your motivators. A dream board is nothing more than a piece of poster board from the office supply that you use as a sort of display to remind you of why you are working to succeed. You can display one motivating dream, or 10 if you have that many. If your motivation is to get a new house, then what you need to do is find pictures of houses like you want and post them on your dream board. Maybe you can draw the floorplan of the house you want. Glue on magazine pictures of the kitchen you want it to have, the back yard, or that great 3-car garage. If your motivation is a car, get pictures of the kind of car you want. Get pictures of the interior and the engine. Try to get pictures that are specifically the color you want.
Some people like to add goal tracking to their dream boards. If you’re saving for a down payment on a dream house, maybe you should build a checklist to track how much profit your business has made that you will apply to that down payment. For instance, if your goal is to make a $50,000 down payment, track your progress by checking off $5,000 increments: $5,000, $10,000, $15,000…$50,000.
Step 3: Use Your Dream Board For Motivation. Place your dream board where you will see it regularly. Maybe you can post it in the kitchen, or in your home office or in the family room. Remember to keep adding to your Dream Board as you find new pictures or drawings you like. When things are tough in your business or you need some motivation just to do the work, you can stop and look at your dream board for a refresher course on why you’re doing it. Maybe this will help you overcome your reluctance to miss a ballgame on TV in order to work on the weekend. Maybe when you’re tired and just want to relax, your dream board will remind you of why you’re pushing yourself. Then you can get back to work.
To be a successful Online Marketer or Entrepreneur, you’ve just got to figure out what motivates you and you’ve got to keep reminding yourself why you’re working so hard to succeed with your business. dream boards are a great way to keep yourself motivated and successful.
When I set out to write this article I intended to write about the importance of never quitting, because the top 3 percent, the truly successful Online Marketers and Entrepreneurs NEVER QUIT. But as I thought about it I realized that never quitting is a side-effect of a mindset which is much more fundamental to success. To be successful you can never quit, but what can support you and empower you to continue in the face of severe distraction or even failure? That’s when I remembered Jean Schlipmann and I realized that I needed to write about passion.
You see, Jean is one of the most profoundly successful and committed persons I’ve ever met. Jean is an entrepreneur, but cut from a different cloth. She’s not an online marketer, rather she is the founder and executive director who drives the James A. Schlipmann Melanoma Cancer Foundation, named after her late husband Jim who lost his battle with melanoma. Jean is truly a leader who has drawn the entire melanoma community together and has brought national attention and focused research dollars to curing this devastating disease. I met Jean in Texas two years ago and could sense how committed and driven she was. That commitment came from losing a young spouse to a horrible disease and vowing with all her life energy that she would stop this disease in her lifetime.
I asked Jean what she thought it really takes to be successful. She said, “It takes passion. You’ve got to find your passion and let it drive everything you do. If you don’t have passion, you’ll never get through the tough times running an organization.” And I could sense her passion pulsing through the conversation. It was energy, a dynamic and positive force I could literally feel. Do I even need to tell you how critical, how essential, and how absolutely necessary it is for you to find your passion and use it in your business? Can you imagine how powerful it will be in driving you and your business to success?
Quite simply, passion and commitment are at the top of the list of what it takes to be a successful Online Marketer and Entrepreneur. It’s what truly separates the “wanna bees” from the top 3 percent of leaders in this industry! With this kind of passion, can you see why successful top 3 percent leaders never quit? It’s outside their realms of imagination! Only persistence, carry-through, and success are on their minds.
What’s your mindset? Are you ready to be passionate about what you do? Are you ready to join the top 3 percent of the Online Marketers and Entrepreneurs in this industry? Reach deep inside, what motivates you to work 7 days a week, 16 hours a day? What is it you can commit yourself to that is worth that much energy? What is it that you’ll do or bust a seam trying until it works? That’s where your passion lies my friend. I wish you the very best of success. Go find your passion!
Whether you’re in Mona Vie or Wealth Masters, online marketing gives you tremendous personal freedom and time to get things done in your life. But as the old axiom goes, with great freedom comes great responsibility! And that just cannot be more appropriate than for us online marketers and online entrepreneurs, whether you are involved in direct sales or network marketing. I don’t know about you, but at my house it can be a rat race just keeping the house going, let alone the house, the business, and all the family and social commitments we all like to enjoy. With all of those distractions vying for my attention, sometimes it’s hard to remember what comes first. For me, I’ve set aside most of the day for work. I try to be flexible with it, but I try to accomplish a specific set of tasks which I call my Daily Routine. This is not a full-blown time management approach, just a way for me to keep track of what I need to do. I hope you can benefit from the same approach.
As I said, my Daily Routine is not set in stone, but I try to work it in general sequence, and I can easily track what I’ve accomplished and what else remains to be done. I built my Daily Routine around the Online Marketing work I do. Your work may require a different set of tasks, but I think you’ll be able to infer what I’ve done below to your own situation. Since I’m better with my creative tasks in the morning, I organized writing and video tasks in the morning, and implementation, communications and training tasks in the afternoon. Here’s my Daily Routine:
Morning Activities
- Always make calls to all new leads and applicants as they come in.
- Attend product webinars/conference calls.
- Determine marketing topic for day.
- Write article on that topic.
- Immediately video tape a version of the article.
- Deploy marketing article to web.
Afternoon Activities
- Attend product webinars/conference calls.
- Always make calls to all new leads and applicants as they come in.
- Complete the marketing deployment activities remaining from this morning.
- Conduct daily Social Networking monitoring, communication and management (friend adds/deletes).
- Any other calls to team, leads and applicants.
- Training – read, listen, or view, etc. (minimum 2 hours).
- Set tomorrow’s training objectives.
So what about you? Do you have certain times of the day when your mind is more productive, or that you’re more creative? Or maybe your tasks would be better organized around function instead of times of day. If you frequently find yourself with too little day and too much unfinished work, then I recommend that you consider defining a Daily Routine. You’ll be glad you did.
