Social Network Marketing
SNM
If you have read my profile you will know that I came to social network marketing (SNM) via a fairly traditional route. I hit my mid-life crisis with a bang at 40 and somehow managed to convince myself that jumping onto the mlm ‘you’ll be rich in no time’ bandwaggon would be the answer to all my problems.
My friends all thought that I had gone completely mad - why would I want to give up my great career as a university lecturer and freelance author/trainer? No, no, no I told them; the future was mlm. Could they not see that they too could replace all their earned income in just a few short months?
Apparently not - unfortunately this made getting the 5 people that I needed a bit harder than I had anticipated!
A typical story
And for the next 18 months my story was about as typical as it gets. Yes, I attended all the company’s events and seminars, yes I bought the DVDs/flyers/business cards etc, and yes I did finally succumb to buying leads and cold calling complete strangers.
How could I have let myself do that? MLM thirves on people’s desperation for money, change, a new lifestyle……We are easy targets for persuasion - ‘you just need to buy this book/tape/CD, just download this MP3, just pay for this seminar ticket and travel 200 miles, just call these people up, just put this web banner on your MySpace profile…….’
Sound familiar?
Truth is that unless you know about online marketing and what the current industry trends are this ‘anybody can build a business’ myth is about as realistic as someone deciding to set up as a dentist/architect/surgeon. Coming from a training background what did I know about online marketing?
Absolutely nothing…as I soon realised
Like so many people I was lured by the idea of a better quality of life with more time and less stress but the reality is far from this cosy story presented by sponsors and mlm uplines all over the world.
Lucky for me the one skill I did have that proved to be useful was the ability to carry out research. When I finally admitted to myself that all my friends had been right and I had been wrong I began to look for answers.
How come some people did make lots of money online whilst most just continued to flounder around like me? What were these people doing that I wasn’t, what did they know that I didn’t?
A little bit of research goes a long way
My research set me on the path that I am still happy to be on - I first found a guy called Mike Dillard and he introduced me to the first significant fact that differentiates 5% of online marketers from 95% of mlmers. Successful online marketers all get paid to find their leads and prospects - they never do this activity for free!
Mike taught me about a system called the ‘funded proposal’ in which someone you don’t know pays you a small amount of money to receive some useful information from you.
In order to get this information the person has to provide some contact details (ususally via a short form) and by sending you their name, email address and phone number they have effectively become your lead. The money you receive (usually under $30) can then pay for more advertising to get more people to buy the information from you and so on. In a very short time you can use this system to build up quite a large list of leads for whatever it is that you are promoting online.
When you learn to use this system properly it basically means that you earn money at the same time as finding people to run your business opportunity past. Many people in mlm can’t keep going long enough to build a downline becasue they are paying for leads instead of getting paid to create their own.
As I did not have any useful information of my own at this time I bought into Mike’s Magnetic Sponsoring and began to generate my own leads for the very first time!
I also learn some other very important things from Mike such as the concept of ‘up-selling’ (I will write a separate blog on this soon)
All these leads but no place to go
Now my problem was that I was generating lots of leads but I didn’t really know what to do with them! I had lost all belief in mlm and had not yet found the answer to how people really make money online.
But I kept on looking and researching and eventually I was introduced to Dennis Karganilla who is now my mentor.
From Dennis and other members of his mentoring programme I learned that there were many different ways to make money online - mlm being only one of them (and certainly not the easiest) He also taught me that however I chose to make money I had to build a business around myself rather than a product or an opportunity.
I studied many forms of online marketing - attraction, permission, attention etc. I read reports by Rich Schefren, Jay Abraham, Eben Pagan and I bought training and development programmes that had been developed by some of the top internet marketers.
After all, you wouldn’t try to set up in business as a dentist unless you went to university to study dentistry would you? It now really amazes me how so many people, including myself at one time, really think that they can become a successful online marketer without studying the subject first.
I come across so many people telling me that they are going to become a millionaire yet they are categorically not going to invest a single penny on their online marketing education. How do they expect other people to take them seriously if they are not even willing to invest in themselves first.
Putting everything that I learned together revealed a way that I could put my own online business together without having to go through all the hassle of trying to promote a business opportunity or recruit a downline.
The birth of my own online business
Social network marketing has allowed me to build up several friends lists, my own opt-in subscriber group, run my own web site, attract endless free leads, convert prospects into customers and generally earn more whilst working less (a lot less!)
What I began to see was a whole group of people who were all trying to work online but without the right tools and without a clue about how it really works. So I worked out a way of helping this group of people whilst maing money for myself at the same time - a win-win situation.
I still use my teaching skills to coach and mentor people but now I am sharing information about how to generate leads, how to build an opt-in list, how to earn money from multiple income streams etc. As with every career there is a lot more to social network marketing than meets the eye and spending a few minutes on MySpace will quickly show you that most people either haven’t got a clue or they do it very badly…
‘Hey, I am Mr Millionaire and I can make you rich in 2 seconds. Just give me all your contact details and I’ll send you some rubbish report that will tell you something that you already know’
No, No, No! This is not how it is done.
Over the coming weeks and months I am going to be writing blogs on all the different aspects of how to develop multiple income streams from affiliate products and services as well as how to create and brand an online business from scratch.
Unlike much of the rubbish out there I am always straight and direct with people - building any online business (whether it is mlm, snm, affiliate marketing or whatever) will require a financial investment . First you have to have some thing to sell and then you have to learn how to sell it. Finally you have to learn how to convert prospects, build a brand that people trust and build a business so that you can stop working.
Only about 1% of people who try online marketing ever manage to replace 100% of their earned income - I’m one of them so I do know what I am talking about. And if you’d like to know more bookmark my blog and keep looking out for the next one or get in touch with me.
Tags: affiliate marketing, attraction marketing, home based business, internet marketing, mlm, network marketing, online marketing, work from home, work online
July 24th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
make money online…
Very well said. Thanks for your regular updates….