Network Marketing Internet Business Optimization

The 100 top Internet business opportunities are primarily Network Marketing, also called Multi-Level Marketing, companies. These companies provide a compensation plan and pay structure that really can't be beat by any other type of Internet business opportunity. Recently, Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki have both endorsed the direct sales industry. Mr. Trump stated on the David Letterman show that if he had to start from scratch and build a financial empire today that he would start with a network marketing company. When the audience laughed he said, "That's why I'm sitting up here and you are all sitting out there!"

The problem, however, lies in the fact that virtually every one of these companies, despite their brilliant business models, train their representatives in an old-fashioned, out-dated approach to marketing. As a result the average new representative quits within the first 90 days of business.

In the 70s, it was possible, although still very difficult, to build an MLM company by just talking to friends and family members and bringing them to presentations about the business. But times have changed drastically since then.
Thirty years ago there was no cable TV, no VCRs or DVDs or Blockbuster video stores, no Playstation or electronic games of any sophistication, and most of all---No Internet! Back then virtually all there was to do on a Saturday night was go bowling, go to a drive in movie theatre, or go to a home meeting about a business opportunity. Today, people have so much technology to interact with, that they just don't have time for much human interaction.

Secondly, today people are so inundated with salesmen coming at them from every direction that they have to tune much of it out to maintain their psychological health. Furthermore, people today tend to get down-right hostile when confronted with any type of new opportunity. They are on information overload and will reject you before you ever get a chance to say "Gooby berries from the Antarctic will help you live to 150."

But thirdly, and the primary influence the internet has had on our society, is that people don't socialize or interact at all the way they did thirty years ago. People are so absorbed with the things they can do at home on the internet that social gatherings have, to a large extent, become a thing of the past.

So the only way to effectively build a network marketing business in the information age is to bring the message to the place where people join together, connect, socialize, and do business---The Internet!

If you combine the power of the internet with an MLM business you will not only succeed at network marketing, but you will do it ten times faster than you ever could have using the old-fashioned methods in any decade. This is what the top earners in the industry are doing today, and this is what we teach and train people to do at Kevin Thomas Marketing.

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The importance of good leadership cannot be underestimated as one of the main characteristics of an entrepreneur. When I first heard about multi-level marketing, it was my doctor, of all people, who told me about the business model. He said that, although he had grown a successful practice over the past thirty years, he still didn't have enough money to retire on and live the lifestyle that he hoped for, and that Network Marketing was the fast track to achieving those goals. I was really surprised; I had always thought that it was the doctors and the lawyers who made all the money. As it turned out, when I finally joined an MLM company there were two doctors and three lawyers on the local team, building their home-based businesses right beside me.

Well, I didn't join my doctor's network marketing company; I really didn't see how I would have been able to sell that particular product. But two months later someone approached me with a product that everyone already needed and used on a daily basis. I joined that company because it had a much larger target market, and my doctor had already sold me on the concept.

Right away I had the opportunity to bring my doctor, who had first introduced me to the industry, to one of my company's meetings, the topic being "characteristics of an entrepreneur," and he actually became my first representative. I felt really special. Later, however, I found out that he was involved in seven different MLM companies. All of a sudden I didn't feel so special anymore.

However, when he quit all seven of those companies and put his full focus on the company that had I introduced him to, I felt extremely special. I asked him why he had dropped the other companies, thinking that my company must have a superior product. As it turned out, to my surprise, he was actually a lot more passionate about the other companies. They were all health and wellness companies and he was a doctor. He told me the reason had to do with the leadership, and the characteristics of an entrepreneur that was discussed at the first meeting.

He said that every one of those companies left him on his own after he joined. There was little or no follow up, rarely a phone call, and training on how to build his business seemed very elusive. On the contrary, he said that myself, and my up-line, were on the phone with him at least three times a week, and sometimes more than once a day. We had a step-by-step plan to help him get into profit fast. He said that if he ever had a concern, question, or complaint that, if we missed his phone call, one of us would call him back within the hour to help him. Furthermore, we worked with anyone that he introduced the opportunity to. We did all the presentations, answered all the questions, and began coaching him to help him improve his sales and presentation skills.

It has been said that network marketing is a self-improvement program with a compensation plan attached. That is because of the characteristics of an entrepreneur, and the leadership skills that you can develop if you are on the right team. Taking initiative, building communication skills, becoming an effective speaker, making sure representatives get trained, following up on every potential prospect, and becoming organized and efficient, are just a few of the skills that you can learn under the right leadership. Then you can then pass it all on to your team and everybody makes money.

So leadership is the first characteristic of an entrepreneur. Seek out good leaders and mentors in your business and in life and model their character traits, skills, and behavior. Good mentors will teach you to become a good leader. Become a strong leader and you will be worth a thousand times more than the financial fortune that will be yours.

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Providing value, also referred to as information marketing, is about giving people useful information for free as a way to position yourself as an expert and a leader in a particular field. This is an extremely effective approach to building your network marketing company or any other type of home-based business, and is one of the most important characteristics of an entrepreneur.

If you use the traditional sales approach with people today you will get the door slammed in your face before you can say "Gooby Goo Inc. will make you a millionaire and get you children in the Olympics." It is not that people are ruder today than at any other time in history, although I have heard some good arguments for that, but it has more to do with the fact that people are on information overload and have to tune much of it out to maintain their sanity.

What people are lacking today is concise and valuable information that can help them wade through the mire of advertising garbage. That is the problem the average person faces on a daily basis when attempting to learn something or find a solution to his or her current problems and challenges. But this is also where the characteristics of an entrepreneur can give you the leading edge.

If you can help a person solve his problem, free of charge, no strings attached, with your knowledge, information, and guidance, then you have just branded yourself as a leader and an expert. You will be remembered as the one person who was able to genuinely help.

How will this lead to more sales for your home based business or more prospects for your network marketing company? People follow leaders; people don't follow companies. People are one hundred times more likely to join your business because they feel that you can help them succeed than they are for a great compensation plan, product, or video advertisement. And they are much more likely to buy your products if they sense that you are an expert and not a salesman. People take their doctor's recommendation and purchase his services and prescriptions because he educates them and provides a solution to their problems. He doesn't sell them, the information, and credentials (which you will acquire in your field through endorsements and referrals), positions him as an expert.

If you have the characteristics of an entrepreneur, if you brand yourself as the expert who helps others achieve success, it will be worth a thousand well written advertisements. You will have people contacting you, credit card in hand, ready to join or buy whatever it is that you endorse.

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Let's use the network marketing industry as an example to determine a target market in business, which is one of the most important characteristics of an entrepreneur. As a network marketer, who is your Target Market? Well, people in most MLM companies will tell you that your friends, family, and everyone you've ever met are your target market. Your up-line will usually say that because there is trust in your relationship with people close to you that they are the easiest ones to recruit into your business. There is some truth to the trust concept, but the problem lies in the fact that your friends and family are usually not a group of people who have all been seeking business opportunities. Most amateur networkers will respond to that by stating that you only need two or three. Well, if you've been in the network marketing industry long enough then you know that you need dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of personally recruited representatives before your business will take on a life of its own and really kick out that residual income and make you wealthy, which it will, if you can jump that hurdle.

So if not your friends and family, then who? People looking for home based businesses on-line? That is a little closer, but these are still people you have to convince that your company is not a pyramid scheme or a scam, and that multi-level marketing is a valid business model. Our society, since the onset of the industrial revolution, has been programming its citizens to believe that the only valid way to make a living is by working for a corporation that someone else owns. Individual business ownership is a very foreign concept to most people today.

Your most effective target market in the network marketing industry is actually other network marketers, for the following three reasons. First, there will be no convincing necessary about the validity of this industry. Network marketers are not opportunity seekers; they are opportunity buyers. The difference is that they have already taken action and purchased a business opportunity. They are not people who are pondering the idea of it but who might just decide to stick with being underpaid in a job they don't like and the government taking 40% of their income in taxes for the rest of their lives unless you can convince them that a business opportunity is worth the time and cost.

Second, this industry, with the exception of the top ten MLM companies, desperately needs professional marketing training, which is something that your sales funnel can provide in its affiliate programs (see article: Characteristics of an Entrepreneur Part 5: Sales Funnel). You can give network marketers something they want and need, which has nothing to so with trying to sell to them.

Third, most network marketing teams fail when it comes to leadership (see article: Characteristics of an Entrepreneur Part 1: Leadership) and many people are dissatisfied with the particular MLM that they are building. If you provide leadership with your knowledge and expertise, which will be apparent in the internet marketing system and strategies that you promote (see article: Characteristics of an Entrepreneur Part 4: Tools to Succeed), a percentage of them will want to work with you because of what you can do for their success, no mater what your business opportunity is. As for the ones who do not, you will still make commissions from helping them learn about marketing for their own business. That is called a funded proposal.

The really nice thing is that the people who end up joining your business will be the best possible representatives you could acquire. They will often bring a down-line with them, and they definitely will not need any hand holding or baby sitting to get them to do some work. This is the professional approach to building a multi-million dollar network marketing business.

So, we see that sometimes your target market will be counter-intuitive; it will not always be what you first suspect. That is why one of the most important characteristics of an entrepreneur is being good at determining the target market for your business.

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Knowing what tools will you need to succeed at building a business is an essential characteristic of an entrepreneur. Being able to sort through all the information out there and find the necessary building blocks can sometimes be challenging. Let's use the network marketing example from the last article (Characteristics of an Entrepreneur Part 3: Knowing your Target Market).

Unless you are going to try to build an MLM business the old-fashioned way, prospecting friends, family members, and acquaintances, one person at a time, then you will need the tools that the top earners in this industry are using to build massive businesses online in a few years time. The very first thing that you need is lead capture page. This is a one page web site that gives exciting, emotionally charged information about how you can solve some of your prospects problems. "Earn 10k a month part time," "Feel 15 years younger and live to 100," or "Learn how to build your MLM on line," are common themes for a lead capture page. Excitement and mystery are important here. The more specific details you give, the more your prospect will dismiss the site thinking he knows everything about the topic already, which, of course, he doesn't.

Company replicated web sites do not work, partially because they use an intellectual approach rather than an emotional one. In sales psychology, all sales are based, to one degree or another, on an emotional response, on how it will make the prospect feel. Furthermore, the company sites don't work because they almost always talk about how great the company and products are but they don't say anything about what it will do for your prospect and how it will solve his or her problems. A lead capture page elicits an emotional response and promises more free information that will solve some of your prospects problems in exchange for, and this is the essential ingredient, contact information.

The next thing that you will need is an introduction page with more explicit information about how your product or opportunity will solve your prospects problems.

The third thing that you will need is an auto-responder. This is an online application that forwards the contact information to your e-mail address, and sends a follow up e-mail to your prospect with a link, for future reference, to the introduction page that he has just looked. The real power of an auto-responder, however, is in its ability to automatically send more e-mails at specified durations (every week, or every 4 or 5 days) to your prospects. This is important because most sales are not made on the first look. Some are made on the seventh, or even the fifteenth reminder. If a prospect is not getting any follow up e-mails then he will often completely forget about what you had to offer.

The forth thing that you will need is prewritten follow up e-mails to load into your auto-responder. Each needs to describe a different benefit of the product or service in emotionally charged language. This language is what is referred to as effective "copywriting."

The fifth thing that you will need is a sales funnel, and that will be the topic of my next article.

Now, putting all of this together yourself can be somewhat overwhelming for most people. And it is really much more time and cost effective to find a company that has done all the work for you and has complete tutorials on how to utilize your system to put you in profit fast. That is one of the services that we provide at "Kevin Thomas Marketing," with pre-written e-mails that are geared primarily towards network marketing, or home based business prospects.

To learn how all this translates into fast profits for you, take a look at the next article (Characteristics of an Entrepreneur Part 5: sales Funnel).

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The truth about sales in network marketing, despite what your up-line may have told you about how this is "sharing" not "selling," is that network marketing really is a sales and marketing business. To be good at it you need to learn everything you can about sales and marketing. One of the first rules is that most people will not sign up, or purchase products, on the first look. And a very important statistic in sales is that it is about six times easier to sell again to a pre-existing customer than it is to acquire a new one. To do this effectively you need to have a sales funnel.

A sales funnel begins with your lead capture page (see Characteristics of an Entrepreneur Part 4: Tools to Succeed). Get people excited and promise them some free information that will solve a problem they have. You will still be effectively conditioning your leads to the fact that your services are of value and need to be paid for. But you are starting very small. On a lead capture page the price is merely their contact information. And some people will not pay it and will leave without going any further into the funnel, and that is ok. A sales funnel, in addition to helping you to gradually allow people to sign up for higher priced items or make bigger commitments, also has an incredible sorting capacity. You will lose leads along the way that you never would have been able to sell to in a million years, and you won't have to deal with any of the headaches that those types of people have the unique ability to bestow on others.

The next step in the sales funnel is usually to offer them a low priced educational item, like a twenty-dollar e-book, that can help them further. This can be a book about the products your MLM sells, a guide to business opportunities, or some marketing information to help them build their own business. Now this doesn't have to be your e-book. There are many affiliate programs that will pay you, sometimes over fifty percent, for marketing their items.

What you want is to have a whole back office site full of affiliate products or services that all relate to network marketing. This positions you as the person to come to for all of the network marketing answers. And if you've been in this industry long enough you know that people follow leaders, they don't follow companies. Further steps would be to offer higher priced items and to get paid percentages of all the sales. This is what is referred to as a funded proposal, and understanding these concepts are important characteristics of an entrepreneur.

Most network marketers spend themselves out of business in the first year because they don't make any commissions along the way to pay for the costs of running a home-based business. A funded proposal allows you to get paid small commissions on affiliate products from all the people who would have never joined your business anyway. The truth of the mater is that, for a variety of reasons, the majority of your leads won't join your business opportunity. But you can still help these people with great low priced informational products and get paid for it.

The really nice thing is that by the time a prospect gets through your automated sales funnel, and this can happen very quickly, he is so thoroughly qualified that he is ready to sign up, credit card in hand. Your sales funnel has completely eliminated fear of rejection, which is why a lot of people drop out of MLM companies, has paid you small commissions on all the people who never would have joined your company anyway, and has brought you only the best, most qualified people to build your business.

So the general rule is: "Don't promote your business opportunity on the front end, promote it on the back end." On the front end people don't care about how great your company or product is. There are hundreds of others out there just like it. You need to show them, with valuable information, training, and resources, how you are an expert and a leader who can help them succeed.

Setting up a sales funnel like this yourself can be quite a task. It is much simpler and more cost effective to sign on with a company that has done all the work for you. At www.kevinthomasmarketing.com, this is one of the business building tools that we provide for our network marketers, complete with training tutorials to help you grow your business on-line every step of the way.

Understanding and developing the tools and characteristics of an entrepreneur are the ingredients that will cook you up a fortune in both financial and personal wealth.

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