Buisness: 1 Business Building Tool in Network Marketing

Ever wonder why one person succeeds and another fails in MLM? Or why someone has massive success in a company, then leaves, goes someplace else, and never, ever again duplicates that success? Or why some people spend 5, 10, even 20 years in network marketing with NO success...

Yet they never quit!

Or how an industry that does so many things so wrong can still be so popular ...

This Tool Can Change Your Life

On December 12, 2004, our team released the ebook "Success In 10 Steps", the story of what we have learned from 26 years in MLM.

The feedback has been astonishing.

People say, "I could have written that book!

That was my story.

Why did you steal my story? How could you know exactly what I went through?"

Back in 1991, my mentor was making full-time income from MLM.

He retired from that company and actually joined over 100 network marketing companies in the next few years, to figure out how this industry really works: the good, the bad, the ugly.

Here's what he did:
1. Got on dozens of company conference calls
2. Organized & categorized companies, products, compensation plans, distributor kits, & marketing materials to compare each company with all the others
3. Studied their business models, to understand what kind of behavior certain business models drove
4. Studied how different "upline gurus" trained (or did not train) their people

This process answered all the mysteries. It also revealed some valuable, valuable secrets about network marketing.

Example #1:

The hard-driving, closing salesperson is about 8% of the population. And those 8% have convinced the other 92% that the 8% are right and the 92% are wrong.

How did they do that?

Because that is what THEY do. It works for them, so they have total confidence they are right, and when you feel their confidence, you KNOW they must be right, so you do what they tell you.

92% of the world's population is sales-resistant.

They do not like to be sold, and they do not want to become that pushy, aggressive salesperson nobody likes. Yet when they join MLM, some upline leader tells them,

"Make a list of your friends and family. Call them up. Get 'em into the business. You need to hear 100 'No's for every 'Yes'.

Guess what?

It still only works for the 8%.

If you let them mesmerize you, you can wander aimlessly in the "failure" desert for years...

Maybe forever.

The Choice Is Yours

You can't become something you hate in order to be successful. This model works for the 8% who are real salespeople.

It's a disaster for the rest of us...

A very bad business model.

Example #2:

Every person on the planet has to be educated in the skills of what they're doing.

Whether you're a doctor, carpenter, plumber, ditch digger ... whatever you are... You've got to be taught the skills of that business.

And what "Success In 10 Steps" does for people is, it gets them to realize,

It's not your fault! The people teaching you didn't know any better.

They weren't bad people. They weren't lying to you intentionally. They just didn't know any other way to do the business.

Do you think you can wake up one morning and say, "I'm going to be a doctor!"

And you go down and join a company, get a distributor kit for 50 bucks, and you're a doctor?

Of course not. That's ludicrous.

How about a carpenter?

No way. You have to learn pitches and square and level and plumb.

You have to be taught the skills. Yet people get in network marketing, and they're told,

"Call your friends & family." It's the biggest fallacy in the industry.

Network marketing is not a sales business.

It's a teaching & mentoring business.

When you build people, people will build your business. Those upline guru leaders will tell you,

"Well, you didn't make enough phone calls. You're a loser. If it's to be, it's up to me." Have you heard all that stuff?

I bet you believed it, too, haven't you?

Why This Ebook Is Such a Hot Tool For Building Your Business

So the ebook really opens people's eyes to the fact that they've been lied to. You must do your business with people who WANT to be in business with you. You have to sell product to people who LOVE the product and want to buy it. That only comes through target marketing.

We learned early-on about targeted marketing.

Only talk to people who have raised their hand and want what you have.

Well, guess what? EVERY person who downloads "Success In 10 Steps" is trying to figure out why MLM is not working for them. When you call them up, they could be in a company already. They could be working the business a year or 2 or 5, 7, 10 years. But why would they download that ebook?

They're divulging some critical information. The business is not working for them.

They want to figure out what the problem is. And they're looking to you for help. THAT is the basis of a long-term relationship, and THAT is the effect you can create with "Success In 10 Steps

3 Keys To Success With Your Affiliate Program

Affiliate programs (also called Referral Programs or Partnership Programs) are essentially commission-based sales schemes.

Joining an affiliate program is a neat way to make money from your users. But just as you can join someone else's affiliate program, so you can set up your own program and invite webmasters to sign up. Here are my top 3 tips to succeed with your own affiliate program.

1. How to attract affiliates

One of the biggest fears new Affiliate managers have is in finding new affiliates. This fear is a stumbling block that stops many site owners from getting started with affiliate marketing. Interestingly, with a proper marketing strategy, getting affiliates may not be very difficult. Given below are some tips that may help in attracting new affiliates.

Find complimentary sites - "Complementary" sites are sites that sell products or services that compliment your offers. If you sell "gardening tools", a site that sells books on "gardening tips" would be a perfect affiliate.

Find content sites - There are many sites that do not sell any kind of product or service but are mainly content oriented sites. Such sites promote an idea, concept, study or belief. Content sites that are used as a resource for your target market are ideal affiliates.

Finally, there are several sites on the Internet dedicated to listing affiliate Programs. Get your program listed in these directories.

2. Classifying Affiliates for Better Management

The hardest part of administrating an Affiliate Program is deciding what your affiliates need to help make the sale. But, by carefully categorizing your affiliates, you can easily determine what their needs are and how to accurately meet them.

The first step is to pick at least three types of affiliate. Take a look at your affiliates and try to determine one outstanding characteristic that can easily be compared across the board and choose at least three types of the characteristic.

The Second Step is to determine the needs of each type. Each of your affiliate types will have different needs; some of their needs will overlap, but you should find a distinct difference in many of their needs. If you find that all of them have the same needs, go back to step one and re-think your types.

The Third Step involves the process of creating and compiling linking methods for each group of affiliates. Based on the needs you identified in Step two, create and compile linking methods for each type.

3. Safe Guarding Against Spam

Any time you run a program where your affiliates rely on other signups to generate profits, you will eventually have a problem with spam. One of your affiliates will inevitably get it into their head to blitz the Web with unwanted garbage.

When this happens you need to be ready to take action otherwise it will cost you! Your Internet company can boot you off your server and you can find yourself blacklisted. Not good for business. If you get an email from someone claiming they received spam with your URL, then take it as an early warning.

I am not advising you to immediately terminate the affiliate's account, but be sure to contact them to follow up on the complaint. Let your affiliate know you received a complaint and advise them to remove this person from their list.

If you only get one or two complaints, it's probably not spam, the complainants might simply have signed up for an email list and forgotten all about it. You will know when one of your affiliates is spamming, because you will get anywhere from 10 to 100 complaints in the same day all regarding the same URL.

The best thing to do in this case is to immediately terminate or disable the account of the affiliate URL that was spammed.

Affiliate Programs to Avoid

As an affiliate marketer of Internet dating services, I'm always on the lookout for good quality dating sites and products to offer my single visitors. Merchants help me out when they let me know about their new products and affiliate programs.

I was therefore thrilled when one of my friendly affiliate competitors got in touch to tell me that he'd started his own Internet dating service and affiliate program.

Having launched a community membership site myself last year, I could fully appreciate the huge amount of time and money my friend had invested to develop this new site. He was justifiably proud of his accomplishment and I was excited by the prospect of having a product to promote that would benefit everyone - my customers, my friend and myself.

Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way.

The first stumbling block was the low commission he offered. His top rate was 30%, with no commissions on recurring sales.

This puzzled me. As an affiliate marketer of dating programs, he should have been aware that new sites offer at least 50% on new and recurring sales to entice good affiliates to sign up. If commissions on recurring sales are not offered, then the rates on new sales should be increased to between 70 and 100 percent.

In most cases, his affiliate program would have struck out for me at that point. However, as this was my friend's site, it occurred to me that perhaps his product was so unique that the potential for high volume sales might offset the lower commission. Hoping for the best, I continued my review.

When I got to the site, the first thing I noticed was '6 registered members' prominently displayed at the top of the homepage. That normally wouldn't be a problem, except for the fact that my customers are looking for friends and soul mates. If I send them to a site where there are only six people to meet, they'll likely be disappointed. Worse, by wasting their time, they lose trust in my judgement and then I will lose them as customers.

That's not good. My customers are literally my bread and butter. Giving them what they want and expect is how I stay in business. Paying for traffic that I send to a merchant site where there is nothing to buy, will put me out of business.

(This is how a membership site should be structured. When starting a dating service, the merchant pays for advertising to bring people to their site. To entice visitors to sign up as members, he will initially offer his services for fr*ee. When the database is large enough to attract paying customers, the affiliate program manager then invites potential affiliates to join their program.)

Although my friend's program had already struck out for my customers and me, I was still curious, so I kept on looking.

Next I clicked on a link labeled 'Dating Resources'. Expecting to find Internet dating tips and advice, I found links and banners pointing to Lavalife, FriendFinder and other affiliated dating sites instead. When I asked him about placing affiliate programs on his site, my friend said he simply wanted to supplement his income until the
dating service got *rolling*. I can understand his motivation. However, what he doesn't understand is the concept of customer 'hijacking'.

As an affiliate, you pay good money to get visitors to your site. You presell your merchants' products and expect the merchant to honor their end of the bargain by making the sale and sending your commission check. You don't pay for the merchant to send YOUR customers to THEIR affiliated merchants.

I didn't need to look any further. I told my friend that I would hold off on signing up and why. Fortunately, he understood and has already alleviated some of the problems I mentioned.

Knowing when NOT to sign up for an affiliate program can sometimes be a tough call. However, you can simplify the process considerably. Put yourself inside your customer's head. If the product won't work for them, the program strikes out. Simple as that.

Affiliate: $27,817 Monthly With Affiliate Programs

I still remember thinking that promoting Affiliate Programs was a waste of time. Until I started making a small fortune.
At the end of 2004, I started some time exploring the concept of promoting affiliate programs through pay-per-click search engines. I knew of some Internet Marketing gurus who were claiming you could make thousands of dollars every month. But I was skeptical. I remember thinking, "I know what these guys are about. They just want to sell more books."
But I decided that at least it was worth a look. The concept is quite simple. Choose a product - and one that has an affiliate program, of course. Set up an advertising campaign at a PPC search engine like Google and choose how much you want to pay per click. Write a three line advertisement and add your affiliate link. Whenever anyone clicks through your ad and buys the product, you earn a commission.
So I looked. And thought about it. And looked some more. I was still very uncertain about the whole concept, but I finally decided to test for myself whether it could really work. And since I knew I'd be spending quite a bit of money on advertising clicks, I felt it was well worth investing in a book so I could learn from more experienced marketers how to maximize the profitability of my campaigns.
As my business grew over several weeks I purchased and read several ebooks. By far the best I read was Chris Carpenter's Google Cash ( http://tinyurl.com/6gdaq ). His approach is genuine, down-to-earth, and he explains very clearly how to build your own affiliate marketing business. And importantly, he makes a fortune doing what he explains in the book.
I started by testing 20-30 campaigns on various products. Most of them were unsuccessful, but I expected that from what I had been reading. I would test a product, and if it didn't work, I would drop it quickly. The key with this business is identifying the affiliate products and campaigns that are successful. Once you find one that works, the money starts rolling in.
By February of 2005 I had identified several campaigns that were turning a profit. With one of these I was spending $0.08 per click to promote an affiliate product that pays me $18 commission on each sale. Approximately 1 visitor in 100 buys the product, so I make around $10 profit for every 100 visitors that I send.
What a formula! For every 1,000 visitors, that's $180 in commissions. That might not seem like all that much, but remember once you have a successful campaign it keeps going all day, every day. If you send just 1,000 visitors to a program like this every day, then by the end of the month you will have earned $5,400 in commissions, of which $3,000 is profit.
Does it seem too simple? Well, if it was so easy everyone from your Aunt Mabel to the mailman would be doing it. In fact, while the concept is simple, getting your campaigns to run profitably does take some work. Since I can't possibly teach you all you need to know in one article, I'll give you a few tips here and recommend Google Cash for a detailed explanation:

1. Choose Your Product Wisely. The program should pay a commission of $15 or more, otherwise it won't be worth paying for your clicks. And if the commission is very high, be careful. Some products like web hosting and satellite dish installations may pay commissions of $100, but you face intense competition from other affiliates, so the price you need to pay to get ad exposure and clicks will probably also be very high. Sometimes it is better to identify a niche product with less competition from other affiliates.
2. Track Your Campaigns Carefully. If you're paying around 7 or 8 cents per click for a program that pays close to $20 commission, you need to make at least one sale for every 250 visitors. If you send 300 to 400 visitors with no sale, consider dropping it.
3. Days Of The Week Do Matter. When testing campaigns keep in mind the day of the week and even the time of day. Some products sell better on Mondays through Fridays, during business hours. Others, like entertainment products, sell better in the evenings and on weekends.

Getting back to my own experience, after identifying several campaigns that 'worked', I spent some time fine-tuning them using techniques I read about in Google Cash. By the end of February I had earned $27,817 in commissions for the month, all on products I had never even heard of at the end of 2004. My profit was a neat $10,795.
It's incredible really. I made this money without a web site. From home. Working an average of just an hour or two a day.
I'm finally making the amount of money online that I dreamed about.
How about you? Would you also like to build an affiliate marketing business? Could you use some additional income? I encourage you to proceed, but be smart about it. There are risks involved and you should be aware of them. You should read Chris Carpenter's book. That way you'll be on a fast track to more profitable campaigns. And his book will save you hundreds of dollars, easily, as you avoid some common mistakes and pitfalls.
Good Marketing!