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

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.