Seven Sentences That Can Change the Way You Do Network Marketing

Do you have a network marketing plan? Have you written it down? Have you set yourself up for success or failure? Do you know where your business will be in one year? Five years? Twenty?

Despite popular belief, a network marketing plan does not have to be complex. Your network marketing plan simply needs to define the direction of your business and marketing. You can actually create a network marketing plan in seven sentences. Don’t spend more than five minutes on this network marketing plan. If you spend more time, you will over think and over complicate what really are simple answers.

So, get a pen and paper ready, and let’s outline the seven sentences needed to define your business marketing plan.

Seven sentences to unlock your marketing potential…

Define the purpose of your network marketing. With your marketing, what are you trying to get your intended audience to do? Do not make this a multi-tasking sentence. Many businesses fail in their marketing because they try to get their audience to do to many things. People like simple and clear direction. Do you want to get them to join your newsletter? Do you want them to go to sign up for your team right away?
Stress the benefits of your organization. Why should people choose you? Do you have a great compensation plan? Do you have free training or free online marketing help? If you don’t have any, make them and commit to acting on them now!
Define your target audience. Make this as narrow as possible. You can always widen your range later, but if you begin your marketing plan with too many intended audiences, your plan will lack a clear path and direction. Are you targeting women, men, retired persons, young persons, mothers, entrepreneurs, wealthy, middle class, etc.
Find your niche. This is key. So many marketing plans and businesses miss this important step. If you have ten competitors that are offering the same products or services and have the same basic benefits and the same target audience, how are you and your business going to stand out? Do you offer a more economical choice? Can you offer a wider range of selection? Are you more convenient? Will your advertisements be more humorous or perhaps more sentimental?
Be specific.. there are Riches in Niches!
Define which network marketing strategies you will use. Are you going to focus on telemarketing, online advertisements, radio or television? Will you give gifts or coupons as intensives? Will you ask for testimonials or rely on word of mouth from your customers?
What is your marketing budget? This should not be a hard number that you pull from your head. This number should be a percentage of your projected gross sales. So instead of stating that you will use $1,000 for marketing per month, state that you will use 3 or 4% of your projected profit for marketing.
Finally, you need to define your business identity. Ask, “What is my business’s personality? Are we honest? Do we provide excellent service? Do we perhaps offer less service but offer a better value? Do we have higher prices but better quality?” How will you present yourself to the world?
That’s it! You should have seven clear sentences. Keep this list. Put it some place safe. Frame it if you want to! Most importantly, make sure you take action on the seven sentences you wrote down.

If you are familiar with Internet home-based businesses, then you might have heard of network marketing. Also known as multi-level marketing, and actually describes the model of business distribution for which network marketing stands. Network marketing as a business allows a larger company, called the parent company, to market its services and products directly to its target market. This direct distribution and marketing is done through direct selling, or selling through agents or members of the network. People in the network also refer prospective clients to the business in order to not only gain commissions, but expand the market as well.

Independent distributors will often recommend the company to people. These independent distributors or agents will not be paid salaries. They will represent the larger company, and they are paid through commissions. For instance, they can buy products from the parent company at wholesale prices, and then sell the products at retail prices. The price differential spells commissions and the larger the volume of products sold, the higher the commission and the higher the profit for the agent.

Another way for independent distributors to earn their keep is through commissions. In the past, offline marketing groups simply paid people for the number of people that they successfully recruited into the program. However, thanks to the power of the Internet, as well as evolving business practices, network marketing is more lucrative. Once a person is referred successfully by an independent distributor, this person becomes part of the independent distributors downline.

Every time a person in a downline makes money, the person who recruited him or her also gets commissions. This means that independent distributors need to look not only for more people to recruit into the program, but people who have the same enthusiasm and sales panache as they. This way, they can always be assured of money from the downline. A downline, therefore, is almost like a franchise operation that is reporting to its local managers. The name multi-level marketing owes itself to this aspect of network marketing: there can be a lot of people who receive commissions from one person’s sales, and all these people can be at various levels in the organization.

There are of course a few caveats. Thanks to the anonymity of the Internet, not all companies that you encounter online will be legitimate. In fact, some network marketing companies can feed you into the idea that you will be paid extremely high fees for recruitment and sales, only to run off with your cash. Others might have low quality products and services that only look good in the catalog. You may need to steer clear of these companies by studying your fine print when you do get a contract, and doing a lot of research on people’s experiences with them.

These are only a few facts about network marketing. For more information, do a lot of research, how it has evolved, what kinds of businesses are involved in network marketing, and the products and services that have been sold through this model. You may also want to interview your friends who are network marketers, and who are also involved actively in the industry. With a lot of knowledge, as well as a lot of research, you too can enjoy the fruits of this form of marketing and find yourself earning a lot of profits.

Who would have thought it? It feels as though the economic downturn has fallen on us overnight and suddenly all of our marketing and advertising livelihoods have been thrown into jeopardy. After all, it is the marketing budget that’s the first to be cut in times of a (whisper it) “recession”.

The case for marketing is a strong one though: it’s how business keep the consumer informed about what they do, what problems they solve and what services they offer. But with the recession projected to extend over the next few quarters, marketers are going to have to revaluate their business strategies; now more than ever the business environment is one of cutting marketing costs and increasing gains.

So what’s your marketing department’s survival plan? With the returns on traditional print media diminishing and ‘experimental’ media like iPhones, social networking and blogging still an unknown quantity, the process of elimination leaves only one clear medium still standing: email.

Make Every Penny Count Double or More

The cost of sending an email is significantly lower than sending out a direct mail letter or brochure, or even making a sales call. This is why the return on investment when you make a sales conversion using email marketing is so high compared to other marketing mediums.

Studies by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) have revealed that the ROI on email marketing is nearly 2.5 times higher than other on-line marketing channels and 7 times higher than traditional media. Since the cost of spending an email is so low, you can afford to send more messages to more prospects, thereby increasing the likelihood of making sales conversions in the first place.

Not that the other marketing channels can’t contribute to this process – just think of email marketing as the glue that holds everything else together. It’s highly effective on its own or as part of a multi-channel strategy. Whether you’re an entrepreneur searching for the best way to reach prospects or part of an established business hoping to augment its existing strategies, email marketing ought to be the core of your operations to reduce marketing cost.

How to Grab – and Hold – People’s Attention

Now that you’ve solved the problem of making the most of a reduced budget, you’re probably wondering how this is supposed to make you more sales if shoppers have supposedly stopped spending?

Well, the fact is, consumers haven’t stopped spending at all – they’re just choosing who they buy from much more discerningly, and not necessarily based solely on issues of cost either. Trust and personalisation should be your avatars for the recession; consumers are more inclined to buy from companies that pay attention to what they, the customer, want. This covers everything from the special offers to the marketing updates you send them. There’s no space in consumer’s lives for untargeted, irrelevant emails anymore and neither should there be any room left in yours.

The personalisation capabilities of email are various: recipients can opt-in to the information they want to hear and choose how often they hear it (which improves the ROI on your email marketing even more, as you send only what you need to make a conversion); contact lists can be quickly and easily segmented, and auto-responders can be sent instantly based on consumer behaviour.

Make a Date in Your Calendar

Email marketing should be playing a big part in your marketing strategy during the coming months: if you haven’t been looking into it already, now is the time to take those steps towards safeguarding your position in the industry. This article has been written to help you get started, but there are plenty of other resources available on how to improve your email marketing efforts in the recession.

For the time being, just think of the marketing department as the voice of your company. It’s the voice’s job to be heard above the competition. Now rather than trying to shout the loudest with expensive television, radio, print and telesales marketing, take the customer aside and speak with them personally using email marketing. You’ll see your sales conversions rise and expenses fall faster than you can say ‘direct mail’.

You have read that you can earn an extra income from affiliate marketing, the proven profitable internet business. But, you have no idea on how to get a start. Don’t worry, you are not alone because there are many newbie on the internet looking for a starter guide to enter into affiliate business and earn extra income online. Here are some internet business tips on how to get stared and work your way up to achieve the success in affiliate marketing.

Step 1: Get start by learning the basic first

Many affiliates try to learn how to run before you know how to walk by implementing marketing tactics and strategies without really understand how to make them success. That’s why many of them failed. If you really interested to earn extra income online through affiliate marketing; then get yourself understand first on how affiliate marketing works. Since affiliate marketing is a business of promoting other people product, you need to learn the how to advertise effectively so you can drive the targeted traffic to the destination page(destination page can be at your website or merchant’s landing page). There are many ways to advertise your affiliate business, learn up the pros and cons on each type of advertising program. Pay special attention to pay-per-click advertising program such as Google AdWords because you may want to drive instant traffic using the competitive but effective marketing channel.

Step 2: Find Niche Market You Are Interest In

Once you have learned the basics knowledge of affiliate marketing. Your next step should be finding a niche market to focus on. You can choose to start with the market where you interest is or you can choose the market with high demand. But, if you really want to earn extra income online with affiliate marketing or you are planning to quit you day job once your affiliate revenue beat your day job income, then you should always choose the niche market with huge money circulating around. Such markets may include finance, mortgage, make money online, gambling or education. The markets with huge money circulation will normally very competitive, you should prepare to face the challenge if you want to make a success.

Step 3: Find Targeted Keywords

Most affiliates tend to register a domain name for their website before they do keyword analysis to find the targeted keywords for their niche market. In fact, you should conduct the keyword analysis and find a list of keywords that targeted to your selected market. The key reason to analyze keywords before domain name registration is identify the main keywords that you can included into your domain name; this help in search engine optimization to get better position in search results on the main keywords.

Step 4: Set Up A Website

Although you can choose to do affiliate marketing with direct-linking method which you do not need to have a website, you diverse the traffic generated from your marketing activities directly to the merchant website. This direct-linking method may work find in the past day, but with today’s competitive market, you need to have very good strategies if you want to success using this method. Hence, it is advisable for a new affiliate to do affiliate marketing with a website to pre-sell your visitors before you link them to merchant’s website. At the same time, you need to learn up the search engine optimization techniques so that you can optimize your website to be search engine friendly for your targeted keywords in order to get the free and highly targeted traffic from search engines.

Step 5: Setup, Run, Test & Refine Marketing Campaign
Finally, you are ready for business. You should put your efforts to drive free traffic from a few proven traffic-build methods such article and web directory submission. Although it takes some times to see the results, it’s worth in the long run. At the mean time, you may start to drive traffic to your website using paid search marketing such as pay-per-click or Google AdWords advertising to drive instant drive to your website. No all campaigns will deliver equal results. You should setup, run, test and then refine your ad campaigns until you get profitable campaigns that generate revenue for your affiliate business. Be ready to face some losses during the marketing campaign testing phase.

Summary

Affiliate marketing is a profitable business. You can use it to earn extra income online and even replace your day job income. If you want to success in the business, you need to do it right and you can use the above tips to guide you through.