If you have been in network marketing or have been considering network marketing for any amount of time, you more than likely have heard that leadership is crucial for success in your business.  However, unfortunately, there are thousands of network marketers out there who tell you all about the importance of leadership skills but don’t actually have any themselves and can’t tell you why it is so important.

So why is leadership so important in your network marketing business?

Well, first and foremost, let’s look at the definition of leadership.  According to Dictionary.com the definition of leadership is the position or function of a leader, a person who guides or directs a group and the ability to lead.

Simple, right?

Well, maybe not.  It’s easy to look at the definition and think, “Okay, I know what leadership is, what’s next?”  That can be a hazardous thing to do.

Leadership in any business is a crucial pillar in building a successful business, and is especially true for your network marketing business.  Leadership is the skill that you need for all aspects of your network marketing business.  Let me show you what I am talking about.

Leadership in Prospecting

Leadership while you are prospecting is key.  It ensures that you stay in control of the conversation.  Having leadership skills helps you keep your posture in check.  By showing your leadership skills while talking to a prospect forces that person to see you as a professional and an expert.  Without that, you are not offering this person any real reason to work with you. They are not going to see someone that will take the reins and show them how to build their business; they will see someone who is inexperienced and who simply wants to make money off of them.  Let me tell you, that is the quickest way to get a “no”.

Leadership in Helping Your New Teammates

I see it all the time, so many people start in network marketing but they give up within the first couple of months because they have no idea what to do or even where to start.  So, when you bring someone new into your team, it is very important to help them get off to a good, strong start and help them build a solid foundation for their business.  Without leadership skills, doing this is virtually impossible.  Your new teammates, first of all, need to have the confidence in you, that you can help them do this; otherwise it is going to be very hard to get them to take action.  They will have a hard time trusting your input, even if you know exactly what you are talking about.

Leadership in Leading Your Team

Leadership while leading your team just makes sense.  You have to have the skills to lead your team.  You need leadership skills to help you make and deliver a game plan for each of your teammates or help them do it for themselves.  Most likely, quite a few of them will rely on your input, thoughts and ideas to help them in their business for a while.  Even skilled and established network marketers continue to get advice from their leaders.  Leading your team includes motivating them, helping them set goals, accomplishing them, and so much more. Without leadership skills in this area, you more than likely will not have a plan of action.  Without a plan of action, everyone on your team will be wandering around aimlessly, without any sort of direction.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that lack of Leadership is a business killer on its own.  You and your team may make a little bit of money but it is going to be more stressful than it is worth, and you or your teammates will not have a high rate of retention on your team.  It seems downright impractical to think that without leadership skills, you can lead a team.

Leadership skills are so important in building and sustaining your network marketing business.  While it may seem like a daunting or even overwhelming thought to think that you have to have these leadership skills, especially if you are not a natural born leader, it really doesn’t have to be.  With the right leader and training, you can acquire leadership skills and all of the skills necessary to have an amazingly successful business.  The key is finding that leader or team to help you acquire those skills.

Are you ready to play to win and join the ranks of the 3% having real network marketing success? Learn more about our opportunity and how to start working with us Click here now to request an interview

Like this post? Please do me a quick favor and share with others and comment below.

If I can help you to market online in any way, just let me know!

To Your Massive Success,

Mick Hastings

Home Business Professional

Nutritional Specialist

Licensed Christian Counselor

“Combining the Passion for Helping Others with the Power of the Internet!”

For most folks, owning your own business is a dream come true.  The freedom of being your own boss and succeeding to the best of your ability are facts of life for the small business owner.  Sure, there’s more stress than what you probably imagined when you were creating your grand plans, but with a little strategy and planning you can overcome any tough spot you get in.  There are 6 tactics developed by successful marketers that are sure to make your business as successful as theirs.

1. Create a One of a Kind Selling Point

 

If you want to stand out from the crowd, create a unique selling proposition that stresses the benefits the customers will receive from doing business with you.  Will they get faster service?  Go ahead and dramatize it, but keep the customer at the focus…”Get free overnight delivery!”  Hey, it tells the customer…you get quick service and a discount on shipping; Two definite benefits in one statement.

Why should someone buy from you and not your competitor?  I hate to deal a blow to your ego, but it really has nothing to do with you, your product, or your service.  Yeah, it’s a little self-centered, but customers are attracted by offers that point out the things that benefit THEM.

Don’t go out on a limb to create new products and services to get attention.  Just, add a special benefit to the ones you already have… maybe its quicker service.  The most effective things to emphasize are benefits that your competition cannot or is not willing to give.

 

2. Use Testimonials

 

Hey, we all know that business owners think their product or services are the best thing going, but it’s what the current customers think about it that really matters to your prospective customers.  They’re the ones who see things from their point of view; what they have to say about the business has an impact.

Testimonials play an important part in advertising – especially for small businesses.  Yeah, big businesses with well-known names don’t have to worry about it, but small companies can use testimonials as marketing tools to build credibility.

Think about it…how else can we gain credibility than by creating a group of satisfied customers and shouting what they have to say?  Let’s look at some ways we can make testimonials an effective part of our marketing campaigns.

 

3. Up Sell

 

Up Selling is one of the most successful marketing trends today.  Everywhere you go, someone is trying to get you to buy more.  From McDonalds with its supersize options to clothing stores that try to sell you shoes to match your outfit, everyone’s jumping on the band wagon.  Why?  It works!

Your customers already know that you have great products and provide satisfactory service.  They trust you to come through for them.  Think about it…  it’s much easier to make sales to someone you already have a relationship with.

Use every opportunity to increase your sales volume within the customer audience you already have.  Do you have a product that goes with the one they are purchasing?  Offer it to them at the register.  It’s a proven and effective method for increasing sales.  You may be shocked at the additional sales you can generate from those who are already buying from you.

 

4.  Make Your Price Seem Smaller

 

Divide and conquer…  The old war tactic works in marketing too!  When the price seems too steep, break it down into “buyable” size bites.  A $120 item is only 12 low monthly payments of $10.  A $365 purchase would only cost $1 per day.  Now that sounds affordable!

 

5.  Create Attention Getting Headlines

 

Are you ready to capture your reader’s attention with great copy?  The headline is the place to start.  How often do you scan the newspaper’s headlines before you decide whether or not to read the article?  Yeah, that’s where we lose or gain the reader’s interest, so it’s a pretty important part of the advertisement.

A good headline should telegraph its message in twelve words or less. Double check those headlines.  Do they make a promise of a positive benefit, or ask a provocative question? Don’t settle for less than attention grabbing statements.

 

6.  Provide an Offer They Can’t Resist

 

Is your deal too good to pass up?  If not, you need to improve it.  Hey, I’m not talking about cutting prices even more…you’ve still got to make a profit.  You can make the deal sweeter just by increasing the readers’ knowledge of the value of the product, or adding bonuses that are perceived as valuable, but cost you little.

Motivate buyers with expirations.  An open ended offer encourages procrastination…which leads … nowhere.  When the customer knows he has until Saturday to purchase an item he’ll pay more for on Sunday, he’ll make it a priority to buy.

 

Are you ready to play to win and join the ranks of the 3% having real network marketing success? Learn more about our opportunity and how to start working with us Click here now to request an interview

Like this post? Please do me a quick favor and share with others and comment below.

If I can help you to market online in any way, just let me know!

To Your Massive Success,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mick Hastings

Home Business Professional

Nutritional Specialist

Licensed Christian Counselor

“Combining the Passion for Helping Others with the Power of the Internet!”

I have a confession to make. Ever since I installed the Search Status extension into my FireFox browser I have discovered a new addiction to go right along with my healthy love for PageRank – it’s close cousin, Alexa Rank. In this case the bar is blue, and unlike PageRank the statistic Alexa Rank represents has more to do with traffic and reach than search engine ranking authority or incoming links, but like PageRank is probably best interpreted as a “fun tool” rather than a definitive way to evaluate a website.

 

 

 

The image above is a snapshot taken from the bottom right of my browser. Those bars change for each site I visit. PageRank (green) changes on a per page basis while AlexaRank (blue) is fixed for the entire domain. As much as I try not to give much weighting to those two metrics, I find myself looking at the bars every time I visit a site to help me determine whether the site is worth watching, how well it ranks and how popular it is. If both bars are high I tend to care more – I want to assess why a particular site is doing well.

Before I continue, if you have no idea what PageRank is read this article – PageRank Explained . If you have no idea what Alexa Rank is, then read on…

What Is AlexaRank?

Alexa.com offers a search engine, a directory and a toolbar (among other services). It also has a resource called Alexa Traffic Rankings (click the traffic rankings tab at the top when you get to Alexa.com), which is what we are focusing on when we study Alexa Rank. You can input any domain name into the traffic rankings form and Alexa will spit out the current ranking data for that site.

The Alexa Rank blue bar is a snapshot representation of the full Alexa traffic rankings, which include graphs that track the history of practically every website online, or at least every site Alexa “touches” or is exposed to via it’s toolbar. Each site has ranking number, the lower the number the better, which is an aggregate of the last three months of traffic data.

Here is how Alexa describes their service ~

What is Traffic Rank?

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site’s current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.

Source: About the Alexa Traffic Rankings

I won’t go into detail about all the statistics Alexa provides – there are some pretty cool details available – what I want to focus on is how much attention we should give to the Alexa Rank as an authority on traffic.

The Alexa Toolbar

As mentioned in the description above, Alexa uses data provided by its toolbar users to generate the stats for each site. If you read the disclaimers on the Alexa traffic rankings help page, you will see that Alexa notes for popular sites (lower ranking number) the data is more accurate given the greater sample source, but for lower ranking sites of 100,000+ the accuracy can be dubious. Don’t get confused – remember the lower the Alexa Rank number the higher the popularity of the site and the longer the blue bar will be.

Personally I have used the Alexa Toolbar for about 3 years now and I would think that the average toolbar user represents the average Web user. Hence I would trust Alexa Rank as an authority on traffic; And as a traffic trend watching tool, I think Alexa Rank is valuable and certainly helpful for researching other sites, since the data is public.

Alexa Rank Vs PageRank

One thing that I don’t like about Google’s PageRank is that often a site can enjoy a particularly high ranking, as high as a PageRank 6, and yet seem to have very little traffic. As I have stated previously, I believe PageRank can often be raised to a high level thanks to a handful of links from very high PageRank sites. So for example if you own a PageRank 7 or 8 site, you can point a few links to your other sites and give them a PageRank 5 or 6. Hence PageRank doesn’t necessarily indicate traffic popularity, nor is it intended to, but if like me you want to evaluate a site (possibly to buy it), you really need to know the traffic numbers.

Alexa Rank on the other hand is relevant when it comes to actual traffic numbers. While it won’t tell you anything about the quality of that traffic, or the source, you at least know there is traffic. If I come across a site with a high PageRank but I see a low Alexa Rank I’m more inclined to think the site is “linking well” rather than generating traffic, although certainly both variables are interlinked. If both Alexa Rank and PageRank are high then I’m more confident the site is popular and authoritative.

Of course all this is relative. What is considered “high traffic” by Alexa’s status may be nothing to you. Take businessblogconsulting.com for example. As I type this it has an Alexa Rank of 112,129, a very respectable ranking. I know from server stats that the actual traffic to the site is somewhere in the vicinity of 1200-2000 visitors per day – which isn’t amazing.

Is Alexa Rank Important?

I’m glad to have the benefit of Alexa Rank and I openly admit I pay too much attention to it. It’s a handy tool for evaluating a website and calculating a rough estimation of its traffic. It should be considered a “trend” statistic as opposed to anything concrete and works well in that role because it aggregates data over a rolling three month period., and it works quite well.

I encourage Search Engine Optimizers and Blog Owners to install the SearchStatus extension into FireFox so you become actively aware of the Alexa Rank of a site, but beware giving it too much weight in any important decision making.

Are you ready to play to win and join the ranks of the 3% having real network marketing success? Learn more about our opportunity and how to start working with us Click here now to request an interview

Like this post? Please do me a quick favor and share with others and comment below.

If I can help you to market online in any way, just let me know!

To Your Massive Success,

 

 

 

 

 

Mick Hastings

Home Business Professional

Nutrition & Master Fitness Specialist

Licensed Christian Counselor

“Combining the Passion for Helping Others with The Power of the Internet!”

 

 

 

 

 

Why track your results?

 

Most people that I talk to always ask me why I take the time to track my results. Their biggest question is “Doesn’t that take too much time?”

 

Well, it does take some time but the difference in performance makes it time well spent. For example – I recently did a promotion in 3 ezines ads. It cost me $110.00 to buy the ads, now it was a successful campaign in that I received new subscribers and turned a $50 profit on the venture. Now if I did not track my results I would just rerun the promotion again and again after all turning a 45% profit on my advertising is something I usually want to repeat.

 

The problem came when I looked at exactly where the sales were generated. The first ezine ad cost $30 but generated no sales but sent 55 visitors.

 

The second ezine ad cost $35 but generated $100 in sales with 57 visitors, and the third ad cost $45 and generated $60 in sales with 103 visitors.

 

Now the tracking will allow me to repeat the promotion but be more effective the second time through. Making the assumption that the results will be the same and we all know about assuming things, I could spend $80 instead of $110 and get the same $160 returned of effectively make a 100% profit instead of a 45% profit.

 

Notice the difference though between visitors and sales. If I just tracked visitors I would feel that all three were effective and that the highest priced ad produced the greatest results.

 

That is why it is important to track everything through to your thank you page. After all the final number that matters is how much money each ad generated.

 

Now there is no guarantee that your results will stay the same and they usually don’t. In my case I would run the promotion a second time in all three but if the results were the same (or close to it) then the first ezine would no longer be an option for promoting that product.

 

The third time that I ran the promotion I would try a different ezine to substitute for the first one that despite generating visitors was not sending me buyers. It is not enough to know the profit and loss from a campaign but by tracking you can refine and improve your efforts just by taking the time to track your results.

 

My initial example showed how tracking can improve your results by knowing where your sales are coming from. Let’s discuss how to improve your ads themselves.

First a couple of rules for testing your ads;

1. Only change one thing at a time.

2. Make sure you are comparing apples to apples and not oranges.

For this example we will discuss using safe list ads. First and foremost you need an effective headline.

Now just for a quick aside -Personally, the best use I have found of safe lists is to use them to create subscribers and sell your product on the back end after you have created a relationship. Your relationship with your client is the most important aspect of Marketing! I will cover more on that subject later.

 

Are you ready to start a home-based business?

Just Click on the link above or below and get started NOW!

Are you ready to play to win and join the ranks of the 3% having real network marketing success? Learn more about our opportunity and how to start working with us Click here now to request an interview

Like this post? Please do me a quick favor and share with others and comment below.

To Your Amazing Network Marketing Success!

 

 

 

 

 

Mickey G Hastings

“Combining the Passion for Helping Others with the Power of the Internet!”

MickeyHastings@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the things we get asked the most is how to get Twitter followers. Over the years we’ve researched a number of ways to promote twitter accounts, and we want to share some of these ideas with you. Many users first start out by trying to buy Twitter followers, not realizing that this is against twitter’s rules. Buying followers is a zero sum game, as many of the operators that try and sell followers use unethical means to add followers to your account.

The good news is that there are a number of ways to promote your twitter account safely and ethically. Some are easy to do, some are little more complex, and some even give you ways to get more twitter followers for free. We’ve broken them up into methods you can use online, things you can do on Twitter itself, and real-world methods too.

Things you can do online

Advertise on Twitter

One of the most effective ways to promote yourself is on twitter itself. They offer solutions for promoting your profile, promoting your tweets, or promoting trends. Each method gives you a slightly different way to get your message across. This form of promotion is really powerful when used in combination with one of the other methods listed below, such as running a contest. Promoting your profile will help you grow your following directly, while promoting tweets and trends will allow you to drive other initiatives used to get exposure for yourself.

Run a contest

Running a contest is a great way to attract new followers. Offer a good prize and make sure you clearly communicate the rules of entry. If your prize is related to your brand then it can also help find targeted followers who are interested in your area of expertise.

Be creative! Try giving away an experience, a vacation, a meeting with a celebrity (maybe you?) Contests draw attention! Offer multiple prizes, including a grand prize, 3-5 mid-level prizes, and as many small prizes as you feel like. Set a hashtag for your contest like #mycontestisawesome or #winmystuff, and include it in every tweet about your contest.

Launch your contest through Twitter and any other mediums you are using. Blogs are great at driving contest traffic, because they can explain the prizes and rules in greater detail. Then just tweet about your contest as often as you feel like until you reach your milestone, and award prizes!

Directories – e.g. Twiends!

There are dozens of directories of Twitter users online, including Twiends, WeFollow, and Twellow. Add yourself to as many directories as you can find under the proper categories, and you will begin to see some users following you from these sites. When someone follows you through one of these directories you will receive a notification email from Twitter – if you have these turned on. In these notifications you can see which directory they followed you through.

Guest Blogging

Even if you don’t have a blog of your own, you can easily gain notoriety by writing posts for other blogs. Running a blog is hard work, and most people and companies welcome well written posts to give them a break. If you do score an opportunity to guest post, link to your blog if you like, but be sure to link to your Twitter account as well. Some people will follow you if they liked the post.

This strategy works very well if you can give readers an incentive to follow you. Will they hear about more posts like the one you wrote? Is it the only way to find all of your guest posts? Do you tweet the location of buried treasure on International Talk like a Pirate Day?

Give them a reason to follow you, and you will be amazed at how effective this strategy can be.

Blog about your Twitter account Read the rest of this entry