Five lies you may have been told… and the good news on the other side! You’ve been lied to. If I wrote a book on network marketing that’s how I would start it out. Most of you have been fed lies by the “experts” about how to market your business on the internet. They probably didn’t mean to lie to you. In fact, they may not have known any better themselves.
In this series of articles I’m going to teach you how to properly market your network marketing business on the internet.
In this series we will discuss free, or very low cost, methods of marketing your business. These methods can, in fact, be very effective. Many of them will take a little work, but even those will be easy to do and, most importantly, will be duplicatable. I will also show you a couple of resources I use to outsource aspects of my internet marketing at amazingly affordable prices. NULL Let’s start by discussing 5 of the lies you’ve been told. Have you heard any of these before? 1. All you have to do is buy some Google Adwords ads and watch the sign ups come rolling in! For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about – Google Adwords is the special advertising at Google that appears at the very top and right hand side of the search results. It’s called “Pay Per Click” advertising. You can simply “bid” how much you are willing to pay for each person who clicks on your advertisement. If you bid high enough, your ad will appear in the results. Sounds great, right?
Unfortunately, it isn’t quite what it seems. First of all, and most important to me, is that this is not a duplicatable system.
If you teach your downline to do what you do, they will be bidding on the same keywords as you. Since this is an auction system you’ll actually be bidding up each other’s prices and costing each other money. This is the exact opposite of what you want to do! There are some ways to get around this and actually run successful pay per click campaigns. We’ll cover that topic in subsequent articles. 2. All you have to do to make money is use the “self replicated web site” your company gave you. Have you ever heard someone tell you that all you have to do is throw up some links to your company site and the money will roll in? Never could that be further from the truth! There are certainly some companies that offer self replicated web sites that will work, but often times the company doesn’t really understand internet marketing. Often times, there isn’t a way for you to build a mailing list from the visitors that don’t sign up on the spot. There are some other drawbacks to self replicated web sites as well. Did you know, for example, that in the above example of Google Adwords, they won’t allow multiple people to advertise using the same self replicated web sites? So, if you were advertising your company site you’d have to be the #1 bidder or your ad might not even be shown at all. This means you’d have to pay more money to be seen in Google. That certainly is not something your downline can duplicate! Self replicated web sites also hurt somewhere else. They hurt you in organic search result listings. “Organic” listings are the natural Google search results, not the paid advertising. In organic results Google actually rates poorly sites with self replicated content because many people have used a trick abusing this to get good rankings at Google. Unfortunately that hurts us network marketers who are using self replicated web sites. 3. All you have to do is throw traffic at a web site. The more people that hit your web site the more people you’ll sign up. Have you ever done this? Have you ever bought one of those ads where someone says he can get you 250,000 hits to your web site for only $200? Did you even get a single sign up? I know I’m an “expert” but guess what? I’ve tried this stuff too. It never works. The traffic is often fake traffic and usually you don’t get the 250,000 hits you were promised. Not only that, because the traffic isn’t targeted traffic so the visitors you do get are not interested in what you have to offer. 4. All you have to do is build a mailing list and blast out some emails and you’ll get a ton of sign ups.
This could be true if you know what you are doing, but unfortunately most of us were taught the wrong way to do this.
For example, do you send out your “newsletter” emails from your personal hotmail account? (Yuck! Most of your mail won’t get delivered and you might even get your email address blacklisted due to spam complaints.) Maybe you’re more advanced. You think you’re doing it right. You’ve got your own web site and your own blog. Your web hosting company provides you a mailing list server and you use that to send your newsletters… OUCH! Guess what? If you have a decent size mailing list the spam complaints are going to catch up to you and not only is your email address going to be blacklisted but your entire web site could be blacklisted! This means every time your web address or email appears in an email it triggers spam filters! This does happen. It happened to a very good friend of mine. There are better ways to send out emails and to build your mailing list. These can actually be some of the most effective marketing online… if done right! 5. All you have to do is throw up a few banners on a web site (myspace, ryze, a blog) and you’ll get a ton of sign ups. Maybe in the 1990’s you could do this, but banner ads are becoming less and less useful. A typical banner gets less than 1% of the people who visit your site to click on it. So let’s say it takes 100 visitors to your web site to get 1 person to click. And let’s say you are sending traffic to your company’s self replicated web page which converts also at 1%. You’d need to send 100 clicks to the site to get one sign up. So that means you need 10,000 visitors to your myspace page so 100 people click on the banners and one person signs up for your company or your product. These numbers are horrible as I’m sure many of you don’t even get 10,000 visitors in a year much less in a day or a month. You might be thinking to yourself, “If none of these methods work, then how can I succeed in marketing my business online?”
The good news is that there are other effective ways to market your business online and most of them are pretty easy to do, if you are taught the right way to do them.
Next issue I’ll begin talking about how to attract people to you through your online marketing so you don’t have to call leads any more. I’ll also begin sharing some “how to’s” or at least as much as I can fit in a magazine.
Downloads
Ben wrote a digital book entitled Nichework Marketing: The Step by Step Guide to Finding and Dominating Your Network Marketing Niche Online. The book tells why finding a network marketing niche is so important, especially when marketing your business online. Ben is also launching a training program to go with the book which will give more detailed instructions on how to find your niche and build marketing web sites around this niche.