Greetings,
Do you ever find that you don't have enough good prospects to be talking to when growing your business? Do you ever feel that growing your business would be more fun if you had an unlimited number of people to talk to that were interested in your business and products?
Some of the most frequently asked questions that I get are:
Do leads work?
How do you find quality leads?
What are the different types of leads?
Should I pay a lot for leads?
Today, we're going to solve the problem of leads.
Today, you're going to learn how to have a virtually endless stream of people to speak with about your product, service, and opportunity.
There is no doubt that leads work. The reason that many in MLM and network marketing are taught to chase their 'warm' market is because it sounds easy, and it worked very well...50 years ago. Back then, people knew their neighbors, all the other people in their neighborhood. These days, most people don't even know the people that live in the apartment 5 feet away from them. We are a very different society than we were 50 years ago.
If you are looking to grow a monster-huge business, you will probably have to venture outside of your friends and family to acquire good clients and business builders. Finding targeted leads are a viable way to do this.
You should also know that all leads stink. Now, I'm not saying that leads don't work, because they do work. However, there is this notion that there is some sort of magical lead that is just sitting at home hoping and praying that today will be the the day that we contact them and offer them our product or service. There is no such lead, at least not that I'm aware of. If you know where they are, then clue me in, because I'm still looking.
That being said, finding targeted leads beats chasing friends and family hands down. You have to have a virtually endless supply of new business, and leads accomplish this nicely.
There are 3 different types of leads. Today, I'll cover 2 of them, so that you understand the differences and how to NOT lose money on this.
The first type of lead is what's known as a demographic lead. A demographic lead is separated based on large, general, demographic information. For examples, if you were marketing a health a wellness product that helped reduce joint pain, you might choose to target people over age 50, since they typically have high occurrences of joint pain, arthritis, etc.
If you were marketing a product like a benefits savings package, then you might choose to target young married couples between ages 35 - 45, since they are one of the main groups of people now that is being hammered by this credit crunch.
You can specify that you want demographics of people with a certain credit score, or you can specify that you want demographic leads of people that make over a certain annual income. You can specify that these leads be in a certain geographic location (within 50 miles from where you live, for example).
The important thing to understand is that demographic leads are:
1. The most general (and least targeted) type of lead, and
2. Is the cheapest type of lead.
Demographic leads apply best to products that aren't very niche. Benefits packages, identity theft services, insurance, etc.
The 2nd type of lead is what's known as a Response Lead. A response lead is a lead that had to respond to something. For example, they had to fill out a questionnaire, or they requested more information about a product or service. A response lead is much more targeted than a demographic lead, because they had to take some sort of action in order to become a response lead. You know that they have an interest in whatever they are responding to.
A good example of a response lead is when you order the free information for a Nordic Track or a Bowflex. The fact that you responded to their commercial, and called them for more information, means that you have an interest in what the Nordic Track or Bowflex can do.
You can get targeted response leads for whatever it is that you are marketing. For example, if you were marketing a Telcom service, you could get targeted response leads that responded to some sort of ad for a discounted phone service. If you were marketing a weight loss product, you can get response leads that recently inquired about a weight loss program.
**Special Note**
Opportunity-seeking leads are garbage. They are usually re-sold to the point that if you contact them, they will have talked to 50 other people before you, and will probably tell you to go fly a kite. Opportunity-seeking leads are pseudo-response leads, and the best thing you can do with them is use them to get your fire started on a cold winter night.
When you are "lead shopping" you want to focus in on the benefits of your product or service. If you want to lead with your company's income opportunity, please refer to previous posts here in The Toolbox.
So the big question is: WHERE DO YOU GET LEADS?
Well, there are many different places to find leads.
One way you can get them is through lead brokers. If you do a Google search right now for "leads", you'll see a ton of different companies pop up. You can buy leads from many different sources, but here are some guidelines to go by:
1. Be Cheap - I never pay more than 20 cents per lead. Usually, I like to keep it between 5 and 10 cents. Also, you want to start with very small batches. Remember, if you are dealing with a lead broker, their job is to make you...broker. Sometimes they will have a minimum order or batch of, say, 10 thousand leads. If they do, then keep shopping. You want to start with very small batches of leads, no more than a couple hundred at a time.
2. Avoid Data-Managers - These will be the people on the first few pages of your search results. I personally don't recommend you do business with a data-vendor or data-manager for the simple reason that you will probably be regarded as a "small fry" in their eyes. They typically sell millions of leads each month, so if you come knockin' asking to buy a few hundred leads from them, then it will be difficult to be viewed as a legitimate business in their eyes.
The real "lead brokers" are are on the back pages of your google searches. They're cheap buggers, so they're not going to try to compete with the big data-vendors for the first page of Google rankings. Interview a small brokerage, and build a relationship with a "mom and pop" type of lead firm that will respect small orders, and will treat you as a person.
3. Don't Go For Your First Offer - Shop around for leads. You'll get many different offers. The goal is to not get the absolute cheapest leads, but rather, find a broker that you can build a business relationship with, someone who will back you up and stand behind what they are selling. I'd rather pay a lead broker with integrity twice what I'd pay a lead than a lead broker that could care less about my business. Just like anything else, success with this endeavor will depend on the relationships that you develop.
So now, you know of 2 different types of leads, the differences, where to get them, and what to pay for them. Hopefully, 2008 is shaping up to be a good year for your business.
Have some fun this weekend, enjoy the Super Bowl, and drink responsibly (at least when your spouse is looking ;)
All The Best,
- Joshua Fuson
Turning Liabilities Into Assets
Greetings,
Lets cover a technique that can literally save you hundreds or thousands of dollars, and create a huge supply of very viable leads for your business.
This is a technique that I have used myself to add 10 - 15 reps into my business in a weeks time. It's powerful, and it's advanced. It also takes a few bucks to put together, but you should already know that if you are having trouble keeping your lights on, then a home-based business should not be your priority. A regular job should be your focus.
So in many network marketing / home-based businesses, one of the steps in the process of enrolling someone into your business is giving them a CD or a DVD to watch, which will give them an overview of the company. I've seen these things cost as little as $5, and as much as $10. The theory is that you hand out a bunch of these CD's or DVD's, and hopefully someone will watch it, become interested, and join you in business.
This typically doesn't work very well for 2 reasons:
1. Ineffective Prospecting - If you are paying for marketing material, you don't want to hand it out to just anybody. That's like handing out $5 bills randomly! You only want to hand out that kind of material to people that have already expressed a direct interest in what you have.
2. Ineffective Positioning - If you are handing out CD's and DVD's to your friends, family, and random strangers, then you aren't positioning yourself as a problem solver - instead, it comes across that you are a "gopher" for your company or upline. To be effective, you have to position yourself as the expert, the leader in your business.
So how do we do it?
Here's what you can do:
Take out an ad for your business that focuses on your industry.
Uh-oh, I can hear the screaming already: "NO WAY JOSH, MY COMPANY DOESN'T LET ME ADVERTISE WITHOUT THEIR PERMISSION! I WILL LOST MY DISTRIBUTORSHIP, AND BE BANNED FROM MY COMPANY, ALL BECAUSE I FOLLOWED YOUR STUPID ADVICE!"
Well, most companies don't allow their distributors to advertise their products and services specifically. They have too many "crazies" that make false product claims, false income claims, and flat-out lies about what they can do. So to protect themselves, most companies won't allow their distributors to talk about their specific company, or their specific products.
But that's the KEY - you're not going to talk about your company.
You are going to talk about...(drum roll)...YOU!
I'm going to give you an ad that you can use in your paper, word for word. This ad will position you, and will generate a lead that is specifically interested in your industry. Best of all, it won't say a single thing about your company, nor any product/income claims, nor anything else that jeopardizes your distributorship.
But first, I have to warn you...
If you take this ad out, your phone will melt. Unless you live in a very small town, or take the ad out in a very small paper, this ad will generate a tremendous response. I know, because I've done it. And even though I actually do live in a very small town, this works very well.
Here's the ad:
"Executive Partners Needed
New Discovery In (Your Industry) Creates Huge Demand
Work Part Time / Evenings, Earn Up To $40,000 First Year
Call Mr. / Mrs. (Your Name) at (Your Phone Number)"
So let's do an example. Say you are marketing anti-aging skincare, your name is Maggie Jones, and your phone number is 215-995-1234. Then the ad would say:
"Executive partners Needed
New Discovery In Anti-Aging Industry Creates Huge Demand
Work Part-Time / Evenings, Earn Up to $40 ,000 First year
Call Mrs. Maggie Jones @ 212-995-1234."
You can use this ad for whatever you market, and it will work. Time and again.
So what happens when people call? Well, then you should draw up a script that talked briefly about what you are marketing, and explain that there is actually a DVD that provides all the details. I would speak of the value of the content on this DVD, and inform them that the DVD only costs $5, or however much that I had to pay for the DVD.
Now, you must understand that not everybody will be willing to pay for that DVD. That's fine, we're not looking to hand out marketing materials to every single person. We just want to provide those materials to people who are interested.
So here are the 2 scenarios compared to each other:
OLD WAY - You go and spend a bunch of money on DVD's and CD's to promote your products and opportunity. You hand them out to all of your "warm prospects", which are usually just people that you know. You don't really know whether or not they are interested in your opportunity, you just try to convince them to watch the DVD. Then you call them a week later, and become discouraged when they still haven't watched it. When you call back a week after that, they don't answer the phone, which becomes even more discouraging.
This sucks.
NEW WAY - You take out an ad that talks specifically about your industry, and how how someone could benefit from joining you in business. You then pass on the cost of your marketing material to your prospect by charging them for what you had to pay for it. That way, you're not out any money on the marketing material. They may or may not sign up, but either way, you're not out any money. On top of that, you are only giving those DVD's to people that actually WANT to watch them, so you don't have to convince and pester them to take the time to view it.
This is just one simple way to reach people that are actually interested in what you have. There is more that you can do to increase both the response rate, and the purchase rate for the DVD's, but from a business standpoint, you just performed a miracle, because you just turned a liability (paying for and handing out marketing material) into an asset (free lead generation or even making profit for generating leads).
I'll be talking about an additional technique that I like to use with this process shortly. Stay tuned.
- Josh
Lets cover a technique that can literally save you hundreds or thousands of dollars, and create a huge supply of very viable leads for your business.
This is a technique that I have used myself to add 10 - 15 reps into my business in a weeks time. It's powerful, and it's advanced. It also takes a few bucks to put together, but you should already know that if you are having trouble keeping your lights on, then a home-based business should not be your priority. A regular job should be your focus.
So in many network marketing / home-based businesses, one of the steps in the process of enrolling someone into your business is giving them a CD or a DVD to watch, which will give them an overview of the company. I've seen these things cost as little as $5, and as much as $10. The theory is that you hand out a bunch of these CD's or DVD's, and hopefully someone will watch it, become interested, and join you in business.
This typically doesn't work very well for 2 reasons:
1. Ineffective Prospecting - If you are paying for marketing material, you don't want to hand it out to just anybody. That's like handing out $5 bills randomly! You only want to hand out that kind of material to people that have already expressed a direct interest in what you have.
2. Ineffective Positioning - If you are handing out CD's and DVD's to your friends, family, and random strangers, then you aren't positioning yourself as a problem solver - instead, it comes across that you are a "gopher" for your company or upline. To be effective, you have to position yourself as the expert, the leader in your business.
So how do we do it?
Here's what you can do:
Take out an ad for your business that focuses on your industry.
Uh-oh, I can hear the screaming already: "NO WAY JOSH, MY COMPANY DOESN'T LET ME ADVERTISE WITHOUT THEIR PERMISSION! I WILL LOST MY DISTRIBUTORSHIP, AND BE BANNED FROM MY COMPANY, ALL BECAUSE I FOLLOWED YOUR STUPID ADVICE!"
Well, most companies don't allow their distributors to advertise their products and services specifically. They have too many "crazies" that make false product claims, false income claims, and flat-out lies about what they can do. So to protect themselves, most companies won't allow their distributors to talk about their specific company, or their specific products.
But that's the KEY - you're not going to talk about your company.
You are going to talk about...(drum roll)...YOU!
I'm going to give you an ad that you can use in your paper, word for word. This ad will position you, and will generate a lead that is specifically interested in your industry. Best of all, it won't say a single thing about your company, nor any product/income claims, nor anything else that jeopardizes your distributorship.
But first, I have to warn you...
If you take this ad out, your phone will melt. Unless you live in a very small town, or take the ad out in a very small paper, this ad will generate a tremendous response. I know, because I've done it. And even though I actually do live in a very small town, this works very well.
Here's the ad:
"Executive Partners Needed
New Discovery In (Your Industry) Creates Huge Demand
Work Part Time / Evenings, Earn Up To $40,000 First Year
Call Mr. / Mrs. (Your Name) at (Your Phone Number)"
So let's do an example. Say you are marketing anti-aging skincare, your name is Maggie Jones, and your phone number is 215-995-1234. Then the ad would say:
"Executive partners Needed
New Discovery In Anti-Aging Industry Creates Huge Demand
Work Part-Time / Evenings, Earn Up to $40 ,000 First year
Call Mrs. Maggie Jones @ 212-995-1234."
You can use this ad for whatever you market, and it will work. Time and again.
So what happens when people call? Well, then you should draw up a script that talked briefly about what you are marketing, and explain that there is actually a DVD that provides all the details. I would speak of the value of the content on this DVD, and inform them that the DVD only costs $5, or however much that I had to pay for the DVD.
Now, you must understand that not everybody will be willing to pay for that DVD. That's fine, we're not looking to hand out marketing materials to every single person. We just want to provide those materials to people who are interested.
So here are the 2 scenarios compared to each other:
OLD WAY - You go and spend a bunch of money on DVD's and CD's to promote your products and opportunity. You hand them out to all of your "warm prospects", which are usually just people that you know. You don't really know whether or not they are interested in your opportunity, you just try to convince them to watch the DVD. Then you call them a week later, and become discouraged when they still haven't watched it. When you call back a week after that, they don't answer the phone, which becomes even more discouraging.
This sucks.
NEW WAY - You take out an ad that talks specifically about your industry, and how how someone could benefit from joining you in business. You then pass on the cost of your marketing material to your prospect by charging them for what you had to pay for it. That way, you're not out any money on the marketing material. They may or may not sign up, but either way, you're not out any money. On top of that, you are only giving those DVD's to people that actually WANT to watch them, so you don't have to convince and pester them to take the time to view it.
This is just one simple way to reach people that are actually interested in what you have. There is more that you can do to increase both the response rate, and the purchase rate for the DVD's, but from a business standpoint, you just performed a miracle, because you just turned a liability (paying for and handing out marketing material) into an asset (free lead generation or even making profit for generating leads).
I'll be talking about an additional technique that I like to use with this process shortly. Stay tuned.
- Josh
Web 2.0 And Network Marketing
There has been much talk (and hype) concerning web 2.0, and how it is affecting network marketers. I have received a tremendous number of requests about how to capitalize on the opportunities that we are currently seeing with social media websites. But first, lets take a step backward, and answer a very fundamental question:
What is web 2.0?
Web 2.0 refers to the change that we are seeing in the uprising of social media websites. MySpace. Facebook. YouTube. Digg. Bebo. Technorati. Blogs (just like this one). Podcasts. RSS feeds. Web 2.0 is about community, and developing a peer group of like-minded people.
The reason we see so many of these social networking sites becoming amazingly popular is because of the shift that we have been seeing in our society over the last several years. People don't know everyone in their neighborhood any longer. The fabric of our society is no longer knit together by geographic location. Just because I live in your neighborhood doesn't mean that you will take the time to get to know me. And just because someone lives in my across the street from me doesn't mean that I'm going to take the time to develop a friendship with them. Because of this, many people in network marketing are finding it harder and harder to make a "list of 100". Honestly, most people don't know of 100 friends or family that they have a close enough relationship with to feel comfortable exposing them to your product and service.
Enter: The Internet
The Internet is an explosive business growth tool. Every day, millions of people go online looking for information about products, services, and business opportunities. Back when the Internet was first becoming popular (1998), it was very easy to get tons of very targeted traffic to a website. You could put a very minimal amount of effort into a site, and have several hundred people finding your information every day. Now, things aren't so easy. If you want to grow your business on the Internet, you have to have a good skill set. You have to understand how to provide value and benefit to your market.
I provide information on growing a business using all sorts of crazy tools (press releases, articles, telephone, direct mail, etc.), but I'm finding that more and more network marketers are looking for a way to grow a business inexpensively, and quickly. In fact, the call for that information is becoming so loud, that I can't pretend that I don't hear it any more ;)
So here is something to consider...
Over the next several months, I'm going to be conducting a number of experiments in my lab, which I lovingly refer to as "the cave". Every time I go into the cave, I don't come out until I've had some sort of breakthrough. It's not a pretty site, as sometimes, it takes a long time to come up with a breakthrough. I don't shave, I skip showers, my wife and children usually don't even recognize me when I emerge.
But it's worth it. Because each time, I've come out with more quality content to help you maximize the growth of your business. So over the course of the next few months, keep your eyes peeled, because I will be putting together some information on how to master social media as a business growth tool, and how to do it 100% legally and effectively. From preliminary experiments, I'm seeing that with a minimal amount of effort, you can use Web 2.0 to dominate the top 2-4 pages of search listings. Not the first 2-4 results, but the first 2-4 pages.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll be back out of the cave soon.
What is web 2.0?
Web 2.0 refers to the change that we are seeing in the uprising of social media websites. MySpace. Facebook. YouTube. Digg. Bebo. Technorati. Blogs (just like this one). Podcasts. RSS feeds. Web 2.0 is about community, and developing a peer group of like-minded people.
The reason we see so many of these social networking sites becoming amazingly popular is because of the shift that we have been seeing in our society over the last several years. People don't know everyone in their neighborhood any longer. The fabric of our society is no longer knit together by geographic location. Just because I live in your neighborhood doesn't mean that you will take the time to get to know me. And just because someone lives in my across the street from me doesn't mean that I'm going to take the time to develop a friendship with them. Because of this, many people in network marketing are finding it harder and harder to make a "list of 100". Honestly, most people don't know of 100 friends or family that they have a close enough relationship with to feel comfortable exposing them to your product and service.
Enter: The Internet
The Internet is an explosive business growth tool. Every day, millions of people go online looking for information about products, services, and business opportunities. Back when the Internet was first becoming popular (1998), it was very easy to get tons of very targeted traffic to a website. You could put a very minimal amount of effort into a site, and have several hundred people finding your information every day. Now, things aren't so easy. If you want to grow your business on the Internet, you have to have a good skill set. You have to understand how to provide value and benefit to your market.
I provide information on growing a business using all sorts of crazy tools (press releases, articles, telephone, direct mail, etc.), but I'm finding that more and more network marketers are looking for a way to grow a business inexpensively, and quickly. In fact, the call for that information is becoming so loud, that I can't pretend that I don't hear it any more ;)
So here is something to consider...
Over the next several months, I'm going to be conducting a number of experiments in my lab, which I lovingly refer to as "the cave". Every time I go into the cave, I don't come out until I've had some sort of breakthrough. It's not a pretty site, as sometimes, it takes a long time to come up with a breakthrough. I don't shave, I skip showers, my wife and children usually don't even recognize me when I emerge.
But it's worth it. Because each time, I've come out with more quality content to help you maximize the growth of your business. So over the course of the next few months, keep your eyes peeled, because I will be putting together some information on how to master social media as a business growth tool, and how to do it 100% legally and effectively. From preliminary experiments, I'm seeing that with a minimal amount of effort, you can use Web 2.0 to dominate the top 2-4 pages of search listings. Not the first 2-4 results, but the first 2-4 pages.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll be back out of the cave soon.
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