Network Marketing Tricks

The first batch of £1000 winners were announced today.  7 distributorships have qualified at Gold for 6 consecutive periods to win the £1000 worth or vouchers to be spent with Kleeneze and her sister companies iwoot, farepak, kitbag etc.

The winners are:

Les Thorpe and Lorna Ward
Stuart Mitchell
Philip Palmer
Katie Broughton
Gordon Smith & Cynthia Duran
Kevin & Karen Stephenson
Leeanne Henderson & Michael Tosney

Well done to all of you!  This incentive is open to everyone, just hit gold and maintain it for 6 periods!

Over the next week or so I’m going to talk about the different active and passive methods to promote your business online.  Today I’m starting with reciprocal linking.

Backlinks, or links TO your site from another, benefit you in two ways.  Firstly the obvious - a user may click on the link and visit your site directly.  That one is easy to understand but there is a second benefit.

Pagerank

Search engines give a ranking to every site in their index for specific keywords.  If you type ‘Kleeneze’ into any search engine you will be given a list of sites in order of importance, accoring to the search engine.  Now search engines are not human edited so they use a series of clues to determine which sites come out on top.  One of the things they look at are the backlinks.

For example, if site A links to site B with a links such as Click here for information on Kleeneze then to the search engine site A is recommending site B.  Get enough sites linking to you, and it can increase your ranking.

Google call this ‘recommendation’ factor pagerank.

All links are not created equal

A link from site A might not be as good as a link from site C.  If the search engine already considers site C to be an authority on a subject (ie. has a high pagerank) then links from that site will carry more weight.  The other consideration is the anchor text. That simply means the text in the link (in the example above the anchor text was “click here for information on kleeneze”).  You want the anchor text to include your keywords, i.e. the words which you want to rank highly for.

To start building inbound links one simple way is to reciprocate.  Find other webmasters who might be willing to trade links with you.  You link to their site in return for a link back.  This is a great way to get started  but next time we’ll look at ways of getting one way inbound links.

Wow what a great day.  We travelled up to the Millionaire’s College in Newport today and our downline Clint and Su Minter rolled up in their new Kia 4×4.  This has been a goal of their’s for a long time and now, just 1 year into the business they have their dream car!

At last, the UK main book is now available online at http://kleeneze.co.uk/products/interactive_cat.htm

This means that rather than posting catalogues to interested prospects we can direct them to the website, and that our customers can browse the catalogue inbetween drops!  Make sure your customers know about this new facility and have your details so they can call or email with their orders!

Yesterday I told you about the difference between active and passive promotion and listed some of the passive promotion techniques. Let’s now take a look at each of these techniques in turn:

Reciprocal linking

A reciprocal link does exactly what it says on the tin! You link to another site, and they reciprocate by placing a link back to you. As other webmasters are also trying to get traffic to their sites, there are always people willing to trade links. They key here is to exchange links with quality websites that are on topic. By that I mean sites which have something in common with yours. There is little point in a link from a site specializing in disco equipment, if you sell hearing aids! Choose your link partners carefully and build them steadily over time.

Sponsoring

A reciprocal link is great, but a one way inbound link is even better. Once you have a visitor to your site you want to keep them, you don’t want them to click a link and head off to see your competitors. Therefore one way links are even better than swapping links with other sites. There are plenty of sites which will link to you for a fee. Again make sure you are getting value for money. Any site where you are paying for advertising should be on topic, high quality, and getting a decent level of traffic. Get some facts and figures before putting up any cash.

Forum signatures

Forums can be very useful tools. While blatantly linking to your site within posts will be frowned upon as spamming, there are ways of getting traffic from forums. The key here is to use a signature. Most forums will allow a small signature at the bottom of your posts. In your signature you want a very brief description of your site and a link. The ’secret’ now is to become an active member of the forum. If your posts are interesting and informative they will be read. Try posting about things you know that other readers will be interested in. Keep your posts on topic, reply to other people’s posts in a helpful way, and you will become respected as an authority on your chosen subject. Whenever someone reads one of your posts they will see a link to your site. If they like what you’ve written there is a good chance they will click on your link! Additionally, forum pages get picked up by the search engines so use your keyword in your posts and titles and you may also get extra traffic from Google and the others!

Article Submissions

Like forum posts, articles you have written can have a signature (otherwise known as a resource box) with your link. Many people are scared of writing articles due to lack of experience or confidence but it’s really not that hard. Just write about subjects you know well, and are related to the content of your site. Aim for 1000 - 1500 words. Make sure they are well structured, avoid the first person, and include relevant facts and figures where appropriate. Once you have written (and checked) your article you want a way of using it to generate leads. You can submit to article directories. These are websites which host thousands of articles. Webmasters and newsletter editors can search these directories and if they like your article they can place it on their site, on their blog, in their newsletter etc. The rules are that they must include your resource box and so every time someone uses your article you get a one way link! Again a quick search on Google will show a whole host of article directories but try these for starters: iSnare, GoArticles, EzineArticles, ArticleDashboard.

Blogging

Finally we come to blogging. Unless you’ve had your head in a paper bag for the last couple of years you can’t have failed to notice the upsurge in the blogging community. A blog is like an online journal, or diary. In fact this is a blog you are reading right now! The reason they are such a powerful tool is that by their nature they are text heavy, and constantly being updated. This makes them very popular with the search engines which like sites that are fresh and full of textual content. It also means that visitors tend to come back for repeat visits to see what the news is! A blog is very easy to start and there are loads of free online blogging tools. Just so a search for ‘blog’ on Google and you’ll find plenty including Google’s own blogger.com.

A blog will often get high in the search engine rankings and therefore generate a lot of passive leads. Starting a blog couldn’t be simpler, you just start writing. Here are some tips though, to get you off on the right foot. Firstly your blog wants to be on-topic. If your main site that you want to promote is about ‘home based businesses‘ then that is the subject you want to blog about. Start posting at least a couple of times a week about ‘working from home’. Write about your experiences and expertise with working from home, about great home business websites you have found, about changes in the law which might affect home workers etc. The key is to write little and often, write relevant and interesting posts that people will want to read. It almost goes without saying that you want a link to your main site from your blog, but there is an extra advantage. If you write interesting and useful content on your blog, other blogs and websites will link to your posts. As your blog becomes well known as an authority on your subject you will find more and more webmasters and bloggers link to you, and therefore the traffic to your blog, and to your main site increases!

Passive vs Active

These are a few of the ways that you can generate passive, residual traffic and more traffic means more leads! These techniques however take time. You cannot build an established blog overnight. It will take time for your reputation to grow on the forums you frequent. Your reciprocal links will increase slowly as you build them. Use these techniques to slowly increase your sites exposure over time. PPC and banner advertising can give your site a quick initial boost while you’re increasing your site’s exposure, but these passive techniques will pay off handsomely over time. Most of these ideas take a certain amount of effort but the reward is traffic that comes to you - rather than having to be sought out. Remember, there are no short cuts to anywhere worth going!

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!

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.”

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…

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!

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.