Online affiliate marketing

What is it about some people that allows them to attract huge numbers of prospects whilst others slave away at their PCs 14 hours a day without gaining much success to show for all their efforts?

Why do some people manage to get online and replace their earned income within months whilst others work for years and never break even?

Online success, and indeed success in any business, depends upon how well you can develop and then communicate your personal value.

For those who struggle all day to ‘catch’ people by using the latest fancy SEO techniques, buzz keywords, clever landing pages, cloaked urls, and sales copy it is a very hard life. And it’s a hard sell to try to get anyone to want to replicate this way of working.

On the other hand, for those who can build business systems that do 95% of the work for them they have all the time in the world to develop themselves and build up their personal value.

Imagine you are at a party and in one corner there is the guy telling everyone about his amazing achievements. He’s showing the photos of his Ferrari and the swimming pool that he’s having built for his mansion which he’s hoping will be finished before his world cruise.

In the other corner people are queuing up to chat to the quiet guy who isn’t saying very much about himself at all. In fact he is far more interested in everyone else, he remembers their names and genuinely wants to hear what they have to say.

While one guy may well have a lot more money, the other (who may or may not be financially better off) has far more personal value and that is why people are attracted to him and want to spend time with him.

Truth is on the internet nobody is really interested in you, what you’ve done, how much money you have, how great your opportunity is or how much money you make.

What people are really looking for online is someone who can help them, someone who makes them feel positive about themselves and someone who has genuine personal value and integrity.

So, forget about boasting and trying to impress strangers with your own achievements and concentrate instead on learning how you can best serve others.

When you have developed enough personal value you won’t need to hunt for anyone because the right people will already be there knocking on your door. The law of attraction tells us that like attracts like – so if you want to attract leaders who bring real value first be the leader yourself and give as much value as you can.

  

Mind-set

When I first decided to try working online I had two thoughts in mind:

1.    To quit my job

2.    To make lots of money

I gave no time to thinking about why I wanted to quit my job or even why I wanted lots of money.

I used to enjoy the work that I did as a trainer and university lecturer but gradually I seemed to lose my enthusiasm. Work seemed to be such an effort and I felt constantly tired and would get colds and sore throats every 5 minutes.

My passion for teaching was evaporating as I had to deliver programmes to people who had been sent by their employer. These people had no real interest in the subjects and were only motivated by achieving their next pay scale.

Still, financially we were reasonably well off and certainly we had incomes well above the national average. We lived in a nice house, had a decent car and could afford regular holidays.

So why did I suddenly feel so desperate to change and what drew me to working online?

Motivation

All the things that were motivating me at this time were negative – I wasn’t happy with the area we lived in, I wanted a bigger garden, I was bored and frustrated with my job, I had no quality time….and so on.

My life had become one long moan and I was even starting to bore myself.

But instead of really exploring what was going on in my life that was making me feel this way I typically looked for something to distract my attention.

And when I looked what did I find?

Multi-level marketing on the internet!

Of course this was going to be the answer to all my ‘problems’ – I’d quickly make lots of money and then I could quit work, get a bigger garden and just laze around all day.

Because I was not dealing with any of the things that were really happening in my life I was an ideal candidate for all the dream building hype that so many mlm companies thrive on.

‘You too can be driving this Porche, living in this massive house with a swimming pool and a team of staff to take care of you, you can go to the spa every week and laze around all day in your designer clothes etc

The real reason

There certainly was a reason why I found my way first into mlm and then into social network marketing but I would not find it out until after 18 months of failure, rejection, and ridicule – ‘how’s that pyramid thing going, you a millionaire yet?’.

My mlm experience was fairly common and you can read more about it over on my MySpace page at www.myspace.com/narbundi

Little did I know it during the time when I was pitching my opportunity to anything with a pulse but I was on this journey for a reason. Looking back I can now see so clearly that there was a vital purpose for these unpleasant experiences.

The purpose was so that I could develop into the person that I needed to be in order to gain the things that I really wanted. And the things that I really wanted turned out to be very different from the things that I thought I wanted.

Some universal laws

Many people have heard about the law of attraction as it has received a great deal of publicity recently from the movie The Secret and the availability of The Science of Getting Rich (you can download this book for free at www.supanovasuperstars.com) .

However, there are other universal laws which are just as important.

For example, the law of gratitude. I had reached a point in my life where I was so focussed on everything that was wrong and negative that I forgot to notice all the great and wonderful things that I had.

At a time when I had a wonderful happy marriage, 2 great healthy kids, a comfortable home, a good career etc all I could see was what I didn’t have.

And the more I focussed on what I didn’t have the less progress I was making towards getting the things that I really wanted.

With all this negativity and desperation hanging round me was it any wonder that nobody wanted to join me and become part of my downline! If I had met me at this stage I wouldn’t have joined me either.

And I see this desperation and unhappiness in so many other people who are trying to work online. Like me, so many people are motivated by negative things – they’ve lost their job and need to get money quick, they hate their job and want to quit, their neighbour has a better car so they want an even bigger one.

But negative motivation only ever brings you more of what you are focussing on. So if you are always thinking about bills then more bills will come, if you are constantly worried about your health you will always be ill etc

The power of positive thinking

Most of us have heard about the benefits of positive thinking but very few people actually take the time to learn how to manage their thoughts so that they work for you rather than against you.

Henry Ford once said ‘…either you think you can or you think you can’t, either way you’ll be right’

As soon as I started to be truly grateful for all the wonderful things I already had in my life my thoughts began to work for me instead of against me.

Instead of thinking about the ‘lack’ in my life I started to think about the ’abundance’ and the more abundant my thoughts became the more my reality improved.

Instead of thinking about how many people I needed to recruit in order to replace my income I began to think about how many people I needed to help.

This fundamental shift in thinking led me to find another way of working online. I realised that the reason I had joined an mlm company had nothing to do with the fact that I really wanted to do mlm. My motivation was, therefore, incongruent – meaning my action did not really match what I truly wanted to do.

This is one reason why mlm works for some people but not for most. The people who succeed often do so because they have a genuine passion for the opportunity and the product, the majority who fail do so because their only motivation was to make money.

The reason is revealed

The process of trying to build my mlm business was, on one level, very negative. Yet, at the same time it was the very best thing that could have happened to me.

My total failure to replace my income using mlm made me really examine myself for the first time in years. I realised that my ‘burn out’ was not about lack of money, being in the wrong house, not having enough time etc

My unhappiness was caused by my realisation that I had ‘sold out’ and had stopped growing and moving forward in my life. I was wasting my teaching skills which I valued so much and this burden was affecting all the areas of my life.

In trying to find a way to make my mlm business work I encountered new people, ideas, systems, information and possibilities. I learned that there was a way for me to combine using my teaching skills with making money online and that is what I now do.

I have developed my own online business which continues to go from strength to strength. I work with wonderful people all over the world and am a member of a fantastic mentoring group. I left work forever last year and I help other people to do the same.

So I can now see that my mlm experience was just the universe’s way of revealing my future to me.

Now I start and end each day with gratitude and if you are lost and need to find a new way I suggest that you do the same.

 

  

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.