Network Marketing Tricks

It may be July but Christmas is only just around the corner for us! Tickets for the Christmas conference, to be held at the NIA in Birmingham on 2nd September, are now available. For a limited period these will be on sale at a reduced price of just £10. Not only that, but all distributors who have joined the business since 7th January this year can get a free ticket by calling 0870 730 0145 and giving their name and account number.

So why should you be there? Well, you’ll be among the first to see the new Xmas catalogue, you’ll get all the news about this years European expansion and new products, you’ll get some great training from our network stars, and there will be massive recognition for those who have moved up the network… plus the destination for the International conference 2008 will be announced!

All the top distributors from The UK and Europe will be there - make sure you and your team are among them!

Earlier today I was chatting to a distributor from another network, Forever Living Products (FLP). Although I had heard of the company before I didn’t know an awful lot about it. After well over a year in the business, and with several people in her downline, she was still earning less than £100 per month and was amazed that I had earned well over £250 in my first month with Kleeneze, with nobody in my team! She was even more astounded that within 6 months in Kleeneze, one of my local distributors was earning almost £2000 per month. The big difference was she had to SELL her products, we just show people our catalogue and they place orders, no selling skills needed… In fact I’ve lost count of how many times a customer has called me to place an order, I’ve not even had to go to them! Anybody can do this business, that is the real beauty of it.

Needless to say that she is now taking a look at the business, but I was interested to find out more about FLP. I did a quick search on Google and quickly found their international site. I was amazed at the size of their business - 7.5 million distributors in 105 countries. Compare that to Kleenze with just 15,500 distributors and it’s so clear that we aren’t even scratching the surface yet. Operating just from the UK, Ireland, Holland and just starting in Germany - just how big could this business get? Is 1 million distributors feasible within the next 10 years?

It would certainly seem that figure is not only feasible but entirely conservative. FLP was founded in 1978 and have built their user base in just over 25 years - image how big Kleeneze will be when we are operating in just half as many countries as that… this really is the most exciting time to be involved, in such a rapidly growing business…

Want a slice of the action? Start building your team, act local, think global and see you at the top!

Well, Royal Mail are putting up postage costs in the UK again… but there is some good news too!  While envelopes larger than C5 (i.e. A4 etc.) will cost 42p for up to 100gm as of 21st August, smaller letters will actually go down in price.

Letters in C5 envelopes or smaller (i.e. A4 sheet folded once) weighing up to 100gm will actually go DOWN in price to 30p for first class.  This compares to the current price of 32p for letters up to 60gm in weight.

What does this mean to us?  Well it means that so long as we use small envelopes we will be saving money.  The info packs I currently use weigh just a spot under 60gm and tip the scales if I add an extra brochure or CD - now I’ll be able to send a little extra without adding to the cost.  Hooray for Royal Mail

It’s an old saying but couldn’t be more true in this business. The more stories you can learn, of other distributors in the network with backgrounds and situations different to your own, the easier it becomes to relate to a prospect. When I’m on the phone to a truck driver, or a full time mum I relate Su and Clint’s story from my own team. They were earning well over £20,000 pa within just six months. When I’m chatting to a surfer I’ll mention Gavin Scott and how he’s built his massive business with no business skills or background - just determination and hard work.

Our recent newspaper article has been added to the Terrier group’s testimonials page. Be sure to check it out and read as many of the stories as you can - the value of learning these is hard to over emphasize. You do need to become an expert on the business, learn the facts and figures so you appear knowledgeable and people will trust your expertise. But learn stories, the real life examples of how people become successful in this business, and your team will really start to grow!

Coming from a web design/development background I’m amazed at the number of networkers (not just Kleeneze but MLM in general) who don’t really understand how to use the Internet for led generation.  Anyone familiar with Edward Ludbrook’s work will know his strong feelings about the use of technology in this business.  I tend to agree, technology should be embraced and used to it’s fullest if you want your business to grow fast.

Over the next few weeks I will be writing a series of guides to using the Internet to enhance your Kleeneze business.  I will deal with the basics of setting up a website, different forms of promotion and advertising, and the use of specific tools such as auto-responders, email blasting, usage statistics and viral marketing.

The Internet is a truley world changing phenomena.  The rate of exponential growth is astounding, from December 1995 with 16 million users, the worldwide network has exploded to 1,023 million users as of March this year (source  Internet World Stats).  This is a massive number of people (approx 15.7% of world population) who you could be targeting online.  However this causes it’s own problem.  With 75.5 million websites (source domaintools.com)  how on earth do you get people to read YOUR site?

This idea of promoting a website and generating traffic has spawned a multi billion dollar industry.  The uninitiated could easily be forgiven for thinking this was a specialist area which they could not hope to dabble in.  SEO, ROI,  PPC, Pagerank, Reciprocal linking, keywords, meta tags, robots… the list of jargon goes on and on.

Don’t fret though, over the next few weeks I’ll be guiding you through the basics, and enabling you to compete with the big boys!  So long as you have a website, however basic, I’ll show you how to attract visitors, increase your hits, and build your online business.

Check back tomorrow for lesson 1 : Website basics

Yesterday I covered just how massive and powerful the Internet is (as if you needed to be told!) and today I’m going to cover the real basics of websites, what you need and how to accomplish that.

Websites come in many different flavors, from the very tiny, to the gargantuan. If you’re not familiar with websites and how they are created the range of options may seem daunting but for our purposes (primarily lead generation) all we need is a domain name, some content, and a method of contact for collecting the prospect’s details.

I’ll deal with domains first. With close to half a million new .com domains registered every day finding a suitable domain name isn’t always an easy task. You want something that grabs the attention. Something simple and easy to remember. Egg.com, Amazon.com, Yahoo.com, there is no way anyone could forget those names, or mis-spell them in their browser, but don’t think for a moment you will find something like that! One and two word domain names are very hard to come by, and hours of frustration await you if you attempt to search for an available one.

So how do we select a suitable domain? Well here are my top tips:

1. Short and Snappy. You want your domain to be simple and easy to remember. As already stated one word domains are probably out of the questions (certainly for .coms) but two or three words, carefully chosen can be just as effective. Everyone remembers my site, www.HateYourBoss.co.uk, which I have printed on all of my stationary. Try a little humour to get noticed and remembered!

2. Expired domains. Although almost half a million .com domains are registered on a daily basis, a very similar figure expire. There are hundreds of thousands of registered domains, not in use as actual websites, which are not renewed and reach the end of their registration EVERY DAY! My second tip then is to see if you can find a gem in those lists. Try a specialist search tool such as Deleted Domains

3. Use a different extension. While the term dot com has become synonymous with the web there are plenty of good alternatives. Using your country code is a good start (.co.uk for UK, .de for Germany etc.) and can give you a much better chance of finding the domain you want. Being a little more experimental however can yield some really great results. Last year for example I set up my first site using the .biz extension (www.yourveryown.biz) and I recently built an online store for a men’s fashion company called Clobber, using the Italian country code (www.clobber.it)

4. Avoid Ambiguous spellings. After building a site for a company named Stetfield Separators, a lot of their customers were complaining they couldn’t access the new site. It turned out that separators is commonly mis-spelt with an ‘e’ in place of the first ‘a’. Bear this in mind when choosing a domain and also try to avoid double characters whenever possible.

5. Don’t get frustrated. While a short and memorable domain is great, don’t fret if you can’t get your first choice. Try writing down a list of 20 keywords then search for domains based on those ideas… keep searching and you will find something suitable.

Any reputable domain registrar or web design/hosting company should have an online domain search tool. If you can’t find one just do a quick search on Google. It may also pay to shop around a little. Domains have become very affordable over the past few years but there are still some companies who insist on over charging!

Tomorrow we’ll deal with content.

OK so we have a domain name but what next… how do we turn that into a website? Well a basic website is really just a collection of files (text, images and layout information known as HTML). You basically have 3 choices:

• Learn the basics and put a site together yourself
• Pay a professional design studio to build a bespoke site for you
• Buy an ‘off the peg’ site designed for your needs

Building a website yourself can be very rewarding. Not only will you learn a lot during the process, but you’ll not be restricted by budget costs - you can build a site as big or small as you like and have total control over it’s design. The problem is that there is a lot more to web design than just typing some text and arranging it neatly on a page.

Web designers fight a constant battle. Every page designed is a compromise between perfect visual design, practicality, usability, accessibility and search engine friendliness! Not only does your site need to look great to a potential visitor but what about to search engine spiders? They are the programs which tirelessly trawl the web indexing it’s pages. If your page doesn’t confirm to some pretty technical standards you could be limiting the number of people who can find it… and what’s the point of a site that nobody visits? To get an idea select view>source from your browser if you’re using Internet Explorer (Firefox users select view>page source, other browsers are similar too!) and you’ll see the HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) that describes the page. This is what the search engines see, a little different to how it looks to a human I’m sure you’ll agree!
The alternative of hiring a professional designer to build a site for you could produce excellent results, but these will be accompanied by a rather hefty bill. However, whether you build the site yourself, or hire a professional, you will need to write the copy (text) to fill out the pages. If you’re not experienced in writing copy you might want to do some research before you start. Having the right content could mean the difference between getting a lead or not!

The alternative then would be an ‘off the peg’ website. These are small, pre-scripted, professionally designed sites which are put together specifically for our purposes and available usually for a small monthly fee. There are quite a few suppliers out there so do shop around but check out www.mm-websites.com for Kleeneze specific sites, pre-scripted in English, Dutch and German for only £5.99 per month (at time of writing) which is very competitive.

So what sort of ‘off the peg’ site do you get for your money? Well you get a small but effective site, professionally designed and built, a feedback form for collecting leads, and usually some form of minor customisation (email and phone numbers etc.) Some suppliers, such as mlm-websites.com, also include visitor tracking statistics and auto-responders.

Whichever route you choose your site will need to be hosted. Hosting is simply rental of server space where your website physically resides. It is a rather techie subject but suffice to say that an ‘off the peg’ site normally comes with hosting, a professional designer would include hosting in their quote, and if you decide to ‘go it alone’ there are plenty of hosting companies out there - just shop around for a good deal.

We’ll come back to content more specifically in a future post but that’s all for today, next we need to collect our visitor’s details which is tomorrows lesson!

You have searched and found a great domain name, you’ve written some superb copy and built a fantastic looking site, and it’s hosted for all the world to see. We’re almost ready to start promoting our site and getting visitors, but there is one very important step yet…

A visitor to your site is of no use to you unless you can convert them to a prospect. You need a way getting their details so you can contact them about your business opportunity. You could of course just have an email address on the site - that would certainly work, but how do you know that they will give you all the information you require? You could include a telephone number, but then you’ll be wasting your time answering calls instead of generating more leads and supporting your team!

The answer is a form. You’ve probably used forms many times when surfing the web. Every time you enter your username and password on a site, every time you fill out a checkout page… that is an HTML form. An HTML form is a collection of elements, text boxes, buttons and selectors which a user can fill out. Typically it might contain fields for name, address, email, telephone etc. There will also be a ’submit’ button which the user clicks when finished.

The form is not a complete solution though - a form must pass it’s data to a script (short program) which will process the information and email it back to you. If you’ve gone down the road of hiring a web designer, or buying an ‘off the peg’ site then your form and script will all be dealt with. If you’ve built your own site however you will need to also write the form and script. Forms are reasonably straight forward - you can find all the info you need about them from many books and websites but try looking at W3Schools to begin with. Their tutorials are excellent and easy to follow.

Scripts are a little more complicated and require a scripting language, specific hosting needs, and possibly specific permission setting on your server. Unless you already have some programming experience I would suggest first speaking with your hosting company and asking if they can provide a form2email script for you, or if they can suggest one. Alternatively try one of the many freely hosted scripts such as the one at WWWTools.

One final point… Instead of having the emails directed straight to your inbox, why not use an autoresponder? Your hosting company should be able to provide one and they are often included free of charge. The script would send the information to your autoresponder which then emails you the user’s details, and also send them an email thanking them for filling out the form… You can also include further information about your business or links to your other sites further promoting your business.

Well we should now have a fully functioning website, next we need to attract some visitors…

We’ll get back to our regular series on website promotion tomorrow but in the meantime I wanted to share this with you. Now that we operate across country borders and in several languages it is vital that we take care with our translation. We don’t want to alienate a prospect from another country by using the wrong words as these famous c***ups demonstrate.

1. Coors put its slogan, “Turn it loose,” into Spanish where it was read as “Suffer from diarrhea.”

10. When Parker Pen marketed a ball-point pen in Mexico, its ads were supposed to have read, “it won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you.” Instead, the company thought that the word “embarazar” (to impregnate) meant to embarrass, so the ad read: “It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant.”

Residual income, that’s what every network marketer in the world joined for. The idea of regular money money coming in, every month, long after you put the work in to earn it. I look at sales leads in the same way. You can do active lead generation which directly relates to the number of leads you’ll get this month, or passive generation to create residual leads.

Let’s say you opened a dry cleaners. If you place an advert in the paper, that is active promotion. You write and pay for an advert, people reading the paper that week get to know about your business. If you want to continue promoting your business in that way though, you need to keep renewing your advert.

If, instead of placing an advert in the paper, you put up a permanent sign in the local town, that would passive promotion. Once you have paid for the sign and got permission to put it in that location, it will continue to promote your business for months or even years to come, with no further input from you!

Generating hits to your website can also be done actively or passively. Active promotion is things like PPC (Pay Per Click), banner advertising, adverts on classified sites etc. These all cost (either time, money or both) and last for a limited time. They certainly work but you have to keep working at promotion to keep getting the visitors.

Passive promotion means that once you have an inbound link to your site, it’s likely to stay there generating traffic for you, freeing you up to do other things.

There are a number of passive online promotion methods:

• Reciprocal linking
• Sponsoring other sites (paid for inbound links)
• Forum signatures
• Article submissions
• Blogging

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at each of these in turn, and show you how to put them in to practice!