...Is Network Marketing Easy??...

I personally believe we do a dis-service to the industry and ourselves if we openly state...or even allude...that NWM is easy. It's not. Nor is any business....WAH or brick & mortar. Anyone who does say different is not being wholly truthful. I find that to be a shame.

NWM requires 3 main ingredients....time, effort, and yes - money. Time is just a matter of redirecting your habits. Not easy but doable. Time directly impacts your efficiency. Effort is entirely controllable by the individual....and directly impacts your effectiveness. Money is self limiting and directly affects both efficiency and effectiveness. An individual must find the best combination of the three that works for them. Someone else can't tell you what that combination is....but can help you find it (for example a good sponsor).

The new mlmer faces a daunting task...and competition...when it comes to "advertising". Finding that "best combination" of time, effort, and money is a growth experience. Rarely will it just appear... education (self and provided) plus mentoring (if available) are important factors and hopefully a fact of life. However, "advertising" is not impossible.

In my mind advertising is just whatever method you choose to "reach" people. It might be the traditional newspaper or ezine ad or the simple greeting and sharing with a friend. How you "advertise" or "share" can take many forms.

There are free and inexpensive methods that do work. It's a matter of finding those that work for you.

For example:

1. Writing and submitting ezine articles is an excellent method. It requires time & effort...but no money. The benefits include increased link popularity for the url used in your sig box (important for search engine ranking), branding, and reach (you can "reach" more with an article than an ezine ad). Plus it's viral. Often your article is archived by publishers and directories.....available well after it was originally offered. Plus publishers and web masters will often "pick up" your article...again well after you originally submitted it.

2. Business cards are always a good method...and more inexpensive than one realizes. You can even make your own. Just pass them out like candy....stores, church, ball games, local events, restaurants (leave 1 with your bill), businesses you frequent, networking meetings, local Chamber Of Commerce. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

3. Flyers, posters, post cards, brochures, etc. can also be done very inexpensively. You can make your own on your PC or purchase custom or ready made templates from numerous online providers. You could even strike up a joint venture with a local community provider. They print it for you and include their "advert" somewhere...you distribute. You both win, you pay less, and maybe influence that partner to be involved in your business.

4. Web decals on your vehicle(s) is another inexpensive method. I have one on each of our family cars (back window) with a short "catch line" and my url. Cost was ~ $40 each but the visibility is priceless.

5. Newspaper/magazine ads can be found that aren't going to cost an arm and a leg. Local publications are a good place to start. http://nationwidenewspapers.com is an excellent source. For some of my services I've found College student newspapers and alumni magazines to be good performers.

These are just a few examples.

Of course there are the traditional ezine ads, leads programs, Forum participation (sig line - branding reputation), search engines, "3 foot rule", etc. Most of these will cost you money...all will cost you time & effort.

The key I believe is in being creative and sticking to what best fits your time, effort, money combination. It is and should be a personal choice. If the dollar "cost" doesn't give you the dollar "value" you hope for....keep looking. But don't EVER give up.

Plus...diversify. Use multiple methods. Why limit yourself to just "one path"?

Should we just sponsor those willing to waste $1,000's advertising? Heck no!! We should sponsor anyone interested and teach them how to advertise in a manner best suited for them. Don't mislead them with false expectations or pressure them into uncomfortable actions. Lead them to solutions which best fit their expectations & abilities (time, effort, money).

John Milton Fogg's answer to the question is priceless......"It is simple, but it isn't easy."

Captures it pretty well I'd say. That's the message. It's not hard to understand...should/is fun.....but does take some effort.

Sending any message to prospects that denies effort is involved or necessary....misleads folks into becoming part of the "failed or quit" statistics.

It leads to false expectations.

They start to think they can sit on the couch with beer & potatoe chips watching Oprah on TV all day....and the money will roll in by itself.

Lays, Coronas, and Dr. Phil aren't going to build your business.

YOU are.

In my mind (OK...my opinion)....that's the core of any message they should receive.

If you really care...that's what you'll tell them.

Be honest....

What do YOU think????

3 Easy To Make Website Blunders You'll Want To Avoid

Avoid These Design Mistakes That Will Shy Viewers Away

When creating your Website there are many things to think about, but lets not forget the basics. This includes your primary design plan or rather the first colors, background and words the visitor sees. Discussed below are ways to successfully execute those three components.

Color Scheme

If you already have a company logo with designated colors, use those and continue the theme. Otherwise choose two to three colors for use on your Website. Stick with these colors and use them on every page. Once you assign a pattern to those colors stay consistent on each page. Example: White background, blue writing and orange bordering. Pull out or download a color wheel. This will help you choose colors that naturally accent one another. You want to catch your viewers’ eye so shy away from dark colors on top of dark colors.

Most commonly used color schemes:

~Red, yellow and white
~Blue and white
~Red, grey and white
~Blue, orange and white
~Yellow, grey and white
~Onion shade, Tan, white

Page Background

The most common mistake here is having a dark background with dark writing or white background with yellow or light pink writing. This is very strenuous to the viewers’ eyes. White backgrounds are used most often and are safe with darker writing. If you have a pattern as your page background, make sure the colors stand out from all the background patterns colors, if not done in black and white. Be sure that your hyperlink doesn’t blend before or after it has been clicked. Links most commonly appear blue before clicked and burgundy after.

Grammar and Spelling

We’re all aware of the spelling and grammar tool on our computers, but sometimes they don’t catch everything. It’s helpful to print the page out and review it from a hard copy. The eye sometimes catches mistakes it may not have seen on the computer screen. Have a peer look over your work - this will help in finding mistakes. Watch out for grammatical and punctuation mistakes your computer may not pick up on. Ex: your, you’re, there, their, its, it’s, viewers’, viewer’s and some time, sometimes.

Think simple with these three components. Complex colors, backgrounds, or words will lead your viewer away. Be inviting to your audience by making your site ‘easy on the eyes.’ Don’t forget to proofread – and remember that two heads are better than one.

3 Benefits Of Pay Per Click Advertising

Over the past few years, pay per click advertising has become an extremely popular option for online marketers. Whether you are working for a large corporation or just have your own web site, PPC advertising can help you achieve your online marketing goals. Thanks to the diversity of companies offering pay per click advertising (from the major search engines of Google, Yahoo and MSN to smaller players like Search Feed and 7Search), you can use PPC advertising to benefit your web site, regardless of your budget. In order to help you understand the true potential of pay per click advertising, here are three benefits that it can provide:

Traffic-Obviously, this is the number one benefit of PPC advertising. Because of the low costs of bidding on keywords, pay per click advertising can help you drive a large amount of traffic for a relatively low price. The other major advantage of PPC traffic is the fact that it is instant. Unlike organic traffic (which can many months or even a year to start coming for new web sites), you can start driving pay per click traffic to your web site right now.

Branding-Many online marketers are working under the misconception that once they have achieved strong organic search engine rankings, running a PPC campaign is worthless. On the contrary, setting up and running a pay per click campaign is quite valuable, even if your web site is drawing in quality traffic organically. The reason that a PPC campaign can compliment organic rankings is that it can help improve your web site’s branding. When potential visitors see your web site listed twice in a search engine’s results, their trust for you will increase immensely. This will translate into more leads and/or sales from your web site, along with more return visitors.

Easy Conversion Tracking-The reason I am adding this as a benefit is because it shows how much easier it is to control and manage your PPC budget versus an SEO or similar budget. When it comes to PPC, you not only know exactly how much money your web site is generating, but you also know exactly how much you had to spend to make it. This will help you carefully plan your budget and get the most results for the money you have.

3 Benefits Of Web Analytics

Web analytics is the process of measuring site statistics and analyzing traffic behavior. Here are there of the main benefits of web analytics.

It is typical for any business to do some data analysis. Data analysis is used to determine sales, profit, loss rate, and market interest. However, in terms of establishing a strong e-presence for your website, there is one tool that you could used in order to collect necessary data that you would need to promote your site.

Web analytics has been gaining steady popularity among websites, blogs and portals. It is used to analyze market trends and to identify website users or visitors. It is also used to determine the behavior of website users. It is a great tool to determine your latest website trends and your visitors’ or users’ preferences in terms of site features. Here are the benefits of web analytics.

Number 1: It helps monitor your visitors and users

With web analytics, you would know how long your visitor stayed in your website, who they are and where they came from. You will be able to know their clickstreams, the keywords they used, and how they came to be in your website (referrer pages, search engines, etc). You would be able to determine how many times a user or a visitor returned to your website and which pages were given preference.

In fact, a web analytics tool would tell you your website usage down to the last specifics. It would tell you about your visitor’s nationality and language. It can even pinpoint the city of origin. Of course, it will tell you the IP addresses and the host used for access. Further analysis would reveal if your visitors were there to actually check out your site or if they were mere strays. Most certainly, you will know how many visitors you get daily.

Number 2: It can help you optimize your website

Once you have carefully studied the actions of your visitors or web users, you would be able to act accordingly in order to optimize your website. You would also have an idea about the things that need changing and the aspects of your website that may appeal more to your market. You would know which pages are most viewed and which are basically ignored. You would be able to adjust certain aspects of your website that need improvement or adjustments. You could then fix any technical problems; or you could also improve, streamline or reshape site navigation to better assist your site users or visitors.

Number 3: It can help you formulate a sales and e-marketing plan

Web analytics will be able to assist you in preparing for an e-marketing plan and course of action. This will be more effective because your plan would be based on actual facts and not mere probabilities. You would be able to really know what your market wants. By tracking the items which were highly viewed, you would learn which products received the highest response. You would also be able to enhance other programs that you have already employed like pay-per-click or PPC advertising. You would be able to get more clients, as well as monitor and keep your clients interested.

3 Commonly Asked Questions About Affiliate Management

People have all kinds of questions about starting their own affiliate program and it’s always a good idea to be prepared. Starting and managing your own affiliate program isn’t something that can be done on the fly. It takes carefully preparation and planning, but the results are well worth it. Here are 3 commonly asked questions:

Question 1: How much commission should I offer in my affiliate program?

How much you offer will depend on the amount you can afford, taking into consideration the lifetime value of a customer, what your competition is doing and how attractive you can make your offer.

As a general statement, information products usually have a higher commission rate - often between 25-50% with the higher end being more common. Consumer products with smaller profit margins can be as low as 5%, but don't often go above 20%.

But what you charge should be based on your own unique business. Here are some more things to help you come to a decision:

Sometimes it's okay to pay a bit more for a first-time customer who will buy from you over and over again.

Always see what your competition is offering. You don't have to get into a commission war, just be sure to make your program very attractive through good conversion rates, unique and useful promotional tools and other attractive features.


Question 2: What kind of affiliate tools should I provide to my affiliates?

The simplest answer is: Give them what they want.

Talk to your affiliates and see what they need to serve their unique audience needs, and where possible, provide it to them.

For hard-hitting promotions, you can craft email copy, conduct live teleseminars with content and sales pitch, special reports, etc.

For the content-starved webmaster (and there are plenty out there), give them things like articles, free ebooks and other informational content.

The important thing is to listen to your affiliates and watch which tools convert best.


Question 3: Q: Can I have an affiliate program with a service-based business?

Sure you can. If you have a profit margin or a lifetime customer value that allows you to pay commissions, certainly.

If you have services available that are at a set price, it's easy to automate everything and run your program, just like a product-based one.

If you charge by the hour or have to give project estimates, it’s a little tougher to automate completely.

Here are a few options:

- Have a script that can track who referred your potential client to you. Ex. Affiliate recommends your service through a tracking link. Potential client clicks the link, checks out your website and fills out a form for more information. Your system tells you who referred the client and if they purchase your services, you can give the affiliate a commission.

- You could do it as a pay-per-lead opportunity where the affiliate is paid a smaller fee for every person that fills out the form for more information. This would be easy to automate in most affiliate systems that can handle pay-per-lead transactions.

- Don't want to go with a full-blown affiliate program? You can institute a client referral program where you simply allow your clients to recommend your service, in return for credit for services. When a new client comes to you, you ask where they heard about you and you add a credit to your referring client's account

An affiliate force is an incredibly powerful thing and when you consider you don’t have to pay affiliates anything until they produce results for you, it’s one of the best deals going in Internet marketing today. Plan your program well and you’ll soon have your own active force of affiliates bringing you new customers every day.

3 Criteria For Ranking Article Directory Sites

Article marketing is becoming more popular as webmasters realize the value in their content. Because of article marketing's popularity, there are literally thousands of article directories all over the internet, with new ones being launched every day. Today, finding the right article directory can seem to be a daunting task.

So, the question becomes, how do you determine which article directories are the best?

Though there are several websites where you could find hundreds of article directories ranked according to popularity, it is best that you make your own evaluation based on your niche as well as your personal preference. Here are a few factors for you to consider when ranking article directory sites.

1) How old is the site?

With the launch of the Wayback Machine, it is now possible for anyone to check web pages that have been archived since 1996. Enter the names of the article directories you are considering and find out how old they are. In this case, the older the better. Google looks at site age for trustworthiness.

If you can't find a site in the Wayback Machine, try doing a whois search. This will give you the date the domain was first registered.

2) Find Google and Yahoo backlinks

If you have already submitted articles to various article directories, enter the title of a few of your older articles and do a Yahoo as well as a Google search.

See where your article is ranked in the search. The articles that are in the top few spots would have been submitted to well-established directories or what Google considers to be the best content display.

The higher up an article directory is listed on Yahoo and Google, the more effective it is.

3) Look at PageRank

PageRank is the numeric value that Google assigns to every web page and is an indication of the importance of a website. The numbers range from 0- 10, with 10 being the most important. Submitting your articles to directories with higher PageRanks can increase your exposure manifold.

3 Easy Steps For An Effective E-marketing Plan

In this day and age, internet marketing is emerging as one of the most viable and cost-effective marketing methodologies especially for small businesses. Here are three easy steps that you can follow for an effective e-marketing plan.

The process of using digital technology in order to sell goods or service is called e-marketing. With the growth of technology and the internet, it has become imperative for businesses to use e-marketing strategies to supplement their traditional marketing methods so as to generate more product sales and to reach a wider market.

E-businesses, though, would generally focus their attention on e-marketing alone. E-marketing uses the same basic concepts as that of traditional marketing. The purpose is to devise strategies in order to deliver your message across to your target market.

The difference with e-marketing lies in the options available to you when marketing and advertising your products, services or business. Of course, you could always use the traditional method, but it is wiser to take advantage of the marketing opportunities that the internet gives.

E-marketing produces tremendous results in terms of increased market share, high margins of profit and continued customer patronage. It is also ideal for small and medium-sized businesses for e-marketing is more affordable and less effort-intensive.

Nevertheless, in order to launch an effective e-marketing campaign, you would first have to create an e-marketing plan. The focus of an e-marketing plan is to ensure high response from prospective customers. Below is a summary of steps for creating an effective e-marketing plan.

Step 1: Determine your target market

Before anything else, you must identify your market. Rank and profile them accordingly and assign resources to each target group. Know their expectations, requirements, needs and wants so that you would have an idea how to go about with your sales pitch. This would also help you in determining your costs and ascertaining your expected benefits. It is also important that you study the market environment and your competitors’ marketing strategies, and give due notice to all possible opportunities.

Step 2: Set e-marketing plan objectives and e-marketing methods

You must immediately set your objectives for your marketing campaign. Are you aiming to increase product or business awareness? Are you aiming for higher website traffic? Would you like to rank high in search engine results? Your objectives may include establishing and raising your e-presence, disseminating business information and sales leads generation.

After determining your objectives, you must establish the e-marketing methods you would use to achieve your objectives. It is not advisable for you to use just one method. It is always wiser to use multiple e-marketing methods.

Step 3: Set a budget and determine your strategies

You should identify the strategies and techniques that you would use to launch your e-marketing campaign. Determine the tactics you would use for implementing your marketing methods. You should formulate strategies that are geared towards capturing your target market’s attention. You must position and differentiate your strategies and establish your priorities.

It is also very important that you carefully budget your expenses, regardless of what objective you have set and what methods you would like to employ. Make sure that your costs will not spiral out of your control. Use the cost/benefit analysis in order to determine an acceptable budget. The benefits should more than compensate for your marketing costs.