If you had $100 to build your business...

One of the things I am super driven to do is learn as much as I possibly can about everything I get involved in. In fact, I tend to obsess over things for awhile when I first get into them. In this vein, I have been researching everything I can get my hands on when it comes to SEO, Blogging, affliate marketing and building an online business. With that in mind, I recently asked a bunch of experienced online business marketers what they would do with 100 dollars to invest in their company, if they could go back to the beginning with the benefit of hindsight.

We all "know" that you need to spend money to make money. While in the online world you often substitute time for money they are some ways to save time by spending money. The problem is there are so many things to spend money on and most of them are worth next to nothing. That Ebook worth 397 that you can have for only 49.95? Chances are its crap and I could pump it out in about a day. That software bundle? it is probably free or cheap software, re-branded to make the seller money, not you.

So I decided to ask what should a marketer spend is first hundred dollar investment on. Why pick $100? Well, while some people have money to spend when they enter the world of network marketing, most of us are doing it to supplement our regular income, so I didn't want to high a price tag. I figured $100 dollars wouldn't break the bank for most people but would be high enough to get some real value. So here are the answers most of which came from the warriorforum.com

War room subscription (or subscription to another popular newsletter)
paid ads
buy content for your blog
Buy the rights to an item to use as a Special Offer
Invest in SEO
PPC marketing and
Quality WordPress themes

There were other ideas but the majority of them were along the same lines. With the exception of the newsletter subscription, they fell into two categories. One was driving traffic to your site whether by ads or better Search engine rankings. The the second was increasing the quality of your blog by buying high quality articles (in addition to writing your own) or making your blog more visually attractive.

The great thing for any of you readers out there, is that those two categories are covered in detail here. Hopefully, the stuff you read here will help you spend your money wisely if you ever decide you want to invest some cash into your online business.

Hope that Helps,
Tony

A Great Web 2.0 SEO tool

During the I posted about earlier Rob Fore talked about the importance of social media, or web 2.0, sites in today's search engine optimization strategies. Rob is a master of SEO. He can get on the front page of google for just about any search term. So when he mentioned a free tool, I had to check it out. The website is socialadr.com and it automatically submits your webpage to over 25 social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Google +1, Stumbleupon, and Linkedin .
How it works it simple. You set up accounts to all these sites (for $11 Socialadr will do it for you), then you are given other peoples bookmarks in your share queue. You share these bookmarks to earn credits which will result in your bookmark being shared by others. It is important to note this isn't really about advertising, it is about creating web 2.0 backlinks. While people will see your website in your share queue, I wouldn't count on people viewing it from there. Take that as a bonus if it comes. Here is the beauty of the system in the words of the SocialAdr team:

Free traffic is what I really wanted, which means getting my pages indexed and ranked in the search engines.  That requires backlinks, backlinks, and more backlinks. I got turned on to social bookmarking sites as a great way to build backlinks to my pages...SocialAdr gives me time to work on the important aspects of my business.  Once I've put my pages in, I know I'm going to get hundreds of links pointing back at my site without doing any work at all.  I don't even have to wait for it to finish.  And since SocialAdr is a web-based tool, it works on any computer, any time. One of the best things about SocialAdr is that the bookmarks I'm getting on the social sites aren't all on my own account.  I'm getting links from hundreds of different users on each of the sites.

Take a look and give it a shot. Social media and web 2.0 backlinks are super important in today's SEO enviroment. These backlinks are on sites that Google already ranks highly, so they are given more weight then some free classified site, that many of you probably use now. It's free, its simple and it could mean the difference between being on the first page of google, and making some sales, or the 30th page and not even being read.

Hope that helps,
Tony

Great free tool to help you improve your website

I ran into a website the other day that I just had to share. It includes many free tools that can help you improve how your website ranks on search engines. The website is www.aboutus.org and it is a free site that initially was started to catalogue who maintained websites based on their About Us page. Now it has become a full service Search Engine Optimization website that you can use free of charge. Start by placing your website address in the search bar. If they do not have data on your site, the system will compile it for you right there. When the report is ready you will see something like this:



As you can see it gives you a quick synopsis of how your home page stacks up. If you click on Home Page Analysis you will see the following image.

 

 Here you can see that my Search Engine Friendliness and Links & Images are good but there is a problem with my Titles and headings. So click on More details under problem and it takes you to this page.



As you can see my Title is good as is my Meta data. When I first did this neither of those passed. So i had to fix them. I have a problem with my H1 heading and it shows how my blog shows up in a search engine. For those of you who don't know what those terms mean you can click Learn More and it will explain it to you. In short Meta Data is HTML code that doesn't show up on a webpage but is used by search engines when it looks for keywords and H1 heading is an important sentence or phrase on a web page that quickly and clearly tells people and search engines what they can expect to find there. I still need to fix that and as soon as I can figure out how to do that in Wordpress, I will. Next if you go back to the main website entry (image 1), you can click Web Presence Report and get something that looks like this:



This gives you a real time look at your presence on the web. As you can see this is for a new site, so there is hardly any web presence. It can show you where to focus to increase your websites visibility online and drive more visitors to your site. In closing, www.aboutus.org is a really cool, free resource you can use to help you as you try to increase your online visibility. It can also help you fix the parts of your sites that are preventing you from getting maximum traffic.

 Hope that helps, Tony

More Downline Coaching Tips

One of the biggest excuses I see about failing at network marketing is, “I can't sell stuff? What do I know about Product X? How can I get people to buy my product?” I am the first guy to tell you that I am no master salesman. I can't sell ice to the Inuit, in fact, on my worst days I feel like I would have a hard time selling them heaters. But I what I do know is coaching and teaching. I have always been a guy that can make someone better than they are and make a team preform better than they have. Because of this, I am focusing on team building and coaching. This actually leads in to my first tip.

Know your strengths and the strengths of your team

Not everyone can be the star running back or quarterback. That is just a fact of life. However, without a good offensive line the running back and quarterback are going to get hurt, a lot. Not many people know this but the left tackle is one of the highest paid positions in professional football. To use another football example, how many placekickers can you name? Chances are not many but placekickers are responsible for more wins than any other single player. Now that you have heard about football, you may be asking what the point to all this is? The point is that we all have individual talent and skills. A good team is one where those talents and skills complement each other and a good coach will know how to put that together.

Find your leaders

As I said above, everyone is good at something and sometimes you will find natural leaders. Use them! Bring them in and have them work with people in your organization. Some people are natural sales people. Have them work with other to increase their sales or maybe use them as the “voice” of your organization. Let them sell people on the product or opportunity. The possibilities are endless you just have to recognize them

Get feedback from your team

Nothing happens in a vacuum. The decisions you make or the advice you give will have effects. The only way to understand those facts is to talk to your team and see how you are doing. Maybe you are not communicating as good as you think you are. Maybe your ideas need some tweaking. Never be afraid to get feedback from people above and below you, it is the only way you will improve. The best leaders are always looking for feedback and are not afraid of constructive criticism.

Don't micromanage

This is a universal truth that is double in this industry. One of the reasons people want to work from home in a network marketing business is to get away from the boss who always looks over their shoulder. Give general direction, what we in the army often call “Giving them their Arcs”. Point your people in a general direction based on some sound principles and let them be creative.

Hope this helps

Tony

Review od My Lead System Pro webinar

Last night I had the chance to check out a webinar hosted by Brian and Norbert of My Leads System Pro. It ran a little long so I only could stick around for the presentations from Rob Fore and Deagan Smith. I want to say up front that I am not a member of any of these peoples organizations, although after the webinar last night that may change.

First up was Rob Fore. Rob has built multiple 6 figure income streams and is a real heavy hitter in the Network Marketing game.  Rob presented his five step process to making money in online marketing. The five steps are as follows:
1. Pick something to sell
2. Ask yourself who would be most likely to buy your product
3. Use keyword research tools to figure out what your target market is searching for when looking for a product like yours
4. Write content that meets those searches or in other words, solve the problem your target market has
5.Promote that content to have it ranked on search engines
Next Rob went into a short primer on how to get that content ranked higher on the search engines. The first tip was to get as many back links as possible. Of particular importance where facebook likes, tweets, google +1, linkdin and other social media sites. One really neat trick he shared was how to get more comments on your blog to have it rated higher. Turn off your spam blocker. Then when you get spam, edit out the link if they have put one in there and answer it as if it was a real person. While we obviously want real people visiting our blogs, when it comes to rankings quantity is more important than quality.
Next up was Daegan Smith. Daegan runs maximum-leverage.com and is one of the premier lead generators out there. I have to be honest, a lot of what he said just flew right over my head. However, one thing I got from his talk was the use of a scientific trial and error approach to creating lead capture pages. He has gone through dozens of different page designs, often tweaking one small thing and then compared them to the old page. Every time he got a bump in leads, or quality of leads, he kept it and continued tweaking. Eventually he began to see patterns which helped him improve those pages even better. If nothing else he proved with real numbers that you have to constantly monitor your marketing strategies and make changes to improve them.
Unfortunately the webinar ran late and I had to get to bed so I missed Todd Falcone's talk but I am sure it was as good as the others. I would like to thank the guys at My Lead System Pro for putting on this free webinar and the presenters for showing their trade secrets for no cost.

Tony

Choosing Topics for your blog post

In my previous post about writing for blogs, I talk about how blogs are a crucial part of success for network marketing. However, one of the biggest challenges for new network marketers is coming up with good topics to write about. If you browse the blogs of successful network marketers, you will see lots of blog postings about how they have succeeded in various aspects of the business. But when you are new to the business, writing about your success is impossible, unless you lie which sadly a lot of people in this industry do every day. So what can you, as a new network marketer, write about?

Well one option is to do what I am doing, that is take an aspect of the business you do know about (in my case writing or coaching) and write about that. You can use your insights from your success in other areas and apply them to network marketing. This will give you some meaningful posts that can help people in the industry while you build you own positive experiences to share latter on. However, what if you don't have any skills that easily relate to network marketing? What can you write about then?

If you are like most people in this industry, you have failed with many systems in the past. A common number thrown about is that 97 percent of network marketers fail to make even 10 dollars from their businesses. What about looking at those failures as a source of blog articles? Human beings learn by failing, we gain experience by attempting something new and that often leads to failure. Failure is not a negative thing if it leads to success in the long run. So what have your failures taught you about network marketing? Where have you gone wrong and how can you help people from making the same mistakes?

People will read your blog if it gives them some insight in to questions they may have or motivates them in someway. In my experience, the people who never fail are of very little use to me as either motivation or examples to learn from. I want to see how people failed and what they did to overcome it because I know that I will fail many times in life and how I overcome that failure will be what defines me, both in business and in life. So embrace you failures and turn them in to successes by using them as topics for quality blog posts.

Hope that helps,
Tony

Coaching your downline in goal setting

I believe that coaching is an integral part of success in a network marketing business, as it is in any endeavour. Successful coaching of a down line is one of the inherent strengths of network marketing. By fostering an environment of teamwork and support from an upline, you can make help make each affiliate greater than they would be on their own. Better affiliates means more success. You will be more successful because your down line will send more commissions up the chain and your affiliates will be more successful because they will feel empowered to work harder and stay with the program longer.

One of the traits that I have discovered reading blogs of top network managers is that they have had great coaches and become great coaches themselves. One of the fundamental aims of this blog will be to help you become a better coach to your affiliates. There are many aspects to good coaching but the aspect I will focus on in this post is motivation. One way to help motivate is to help your down line set goals.

A lack of realistic and concrete goals is a major reason for people quiting network marketing opportunities. They see the claims of tens of thousands of dollars being made with little effort and when that doesn't happen they give up. To combat this, I like to set 3 goals covering the short, medium and long terms with specific content linked to each.

Here is an example of my goals:

Short Term: Earn enough income to pay for the cost of my businesses at the premium level.

Medium Term: Make enough extra money to take my family on a nice vacation once or twice a year

Long Term: Have enough residual income to retire early on a reduced pension and still enjoy the lifestyle I have become accustomed to.

Notice there are no specific dollar amounts listed. I know about how much money I need to accomplish these things but I also know that over time those dollar figures will change. By giving the goals as something I want to do, I keep the focus on why I want to make the money rather than the money itself. The money is only an means to an end, not the end itself.

Set goals for yourself and help your down line set goals as well and you will all profit for it. Once your initial goals are reached, set new ones. They don't have to related to money either. Maybe you have goals of helping 20 people a year achieve their goals or getting your website a higher Alexa ranking. Your goals are only limited by your imagination.

Hope that helps,
Tony

How to write a blog post

One of the best tools you can use to drive traffic to your affiliate sites is a blog post. Many people get scared or intimidated about the prospect of writing because they think, "How am I supposed to write a blog? I don't know how to write."  So they never write anything and maybe repost some form article. Check out most affiliate program blogs and see what I mean. They contain the same articles over and over. Heck, I've been there and I have done it too. So what if I told you that good blog writing is as simple as following a formula?
There are two main ways to structure any article. The first is to go from a wide focus to a narrow focus. That is what I am doing in this article. I am starting with a wide topic of blog writing and narrowing it down to specific tips about blog writing. The second way is to take a specific instance and move to a broad topic. These are really great for taking aspects of your daily life and turning them in to informative blog posts. You take something that happened to you or that you witnessed and you draw some conclusion from it.
The beauty of blogs is that they do not have to be huge articles. 200 to 500 words are ideal lengths of blog posts. Pick a topic and spend 10 minutes writing about it using one of the two formula's above and save it. DO NOT PUBLISH IT RIGHT AWAY! If you are writing for a business, you need to be professional. No professional writer ever publishes his first draft. You shouldn't either. Grab a coffee, take a break and come back to it. Spell check it and look for awkward phrasing or idea flow. Now you can publish it.
Congratulations! You have now become a blog writer. Do this once a week and you will begin to drive traffic to your site.
Hope that helps,
Tony