30 Days "Take Action" Program - Day 11

Marketing 101 - Right Tools, Right Training...

In marketing you need to know what you’re doing, where you’re going, what to expect, how to handle and how to find and enroll prospects. Sound like a tall order? It’s not if you have and use the right tools, the right training and take action daily.

What are the right tools? Instant messengers – doesn’t matter which brand you use – just so long as they are a major part of your marketing strategy. E-mail is crucial. A finely crafted e-mail works wonders with person-to-person prospecting. Don’t rule out phone marketing. One short call to quickly invite a prospect to a team training session speaks volumes about your commitment and leadership qualities

Relationship marketing if used properly, ensures you enroll loyal team members, and keep them. They duplicate your efforts – or – Follow Our Lead. Article marketing is smart marketing. YOU provide articles you've written to other Web sites, blogs and eZines for free. This establishes you as an expert, gives you leads, increased site traffic and improved search engine rankings.

Blogging and SEO (search engine optimization) are two other tools. Blogging provides an arena to combine text, images, links to other blogs, and web pages. About what? FOL and your business. SEO in this instance, refers to understanding what human visitors might search for, and to help match those visitors with sites offering what they want to find.

In order to use any of these marketing tools successfully, it’s important to work with the right people. People who can help you build your business.

And Those People are?

Let’s take a reverse look at something you’re all familiar with – recruiting! Everyone knows you need to recruit lots of people for your downline, to make your online business a success, to ensure a good income. Notice the term good, or qualified, or partner wasn’t mentioned?

And that’s because the prevailing “recruit anything that moves” philosophy doesn’t taken into consideration anything else other than the fact that you need warm bodies. Bad marketing! And an even worse move for your online business success. Why?

If you’re into warm bodies only and don’t take the time to properly qualify them – you can expect them to :

• perform badly
• drop out quickly
• not perform at all or
• cost you business and give you a bad name and reputation.

Nice? It's NOT! Spending time qualifying the people you are going to work with is worth its weight in gold. Sure it takes some extra time, but you can’t afford NOT to do this crucial step.

If your business relies on cold calls, referrals, instant messenger communications, and e-mails, (among other methods of prospecting for leads) you know the importance of properly qualifying prospects. You learn about your prospect and their needs and determine how your product can meet those needs.

What’s a Qualified Prospect? (And, what do you do when you find one?)

A qualified prospect is a person (or business) who needs or desires your product because it satisfies a need or solves some problem they have. Ok, you’re thinking, how can your prospect know if what you’re offering is going to help them since they’ve never heard of you or your product until you contact them.

Easy – because you’ve done your homework prior to contacting them and know Hot Conference, or GDI will enhance their business.

Homework in hand, you start getting to know the prospect – start relationship marketing. Over time talking to them, you’ll get a clear picture of whom you are dealing with – AND – you’ll know if you want to work with them on the FOL Team. REMEMBER: FOL and your other programs are YOUR business and you don’t want just anyone to help you build it.

Some will let you know right away they aren’t interested. Some will call you names. Some will laugh at you. Some simply don’t understand how FOL could work – until you educate them. And, last but not least, some will rule themselves out with their questions to you.

For instance: How hard do I have to work to make any money? How fast can I make money? Is this an MLM scheme? Right then you know FOL isn’t for them because they will not work to make IT work for them. (or you)

SO, don’t waste countless hours of your time trying to convince people to work with you – they either want to (because they recognize the value of the opportunity) or they don’t want to (and hounding them isn’t going to make any difference). They either want to succeed, or they don’t. There isn’t anything in-between. They either want to take action, or they don’t.

They either want to build a business or they don’t. YOU need to figure this out by qualifying them - asking questions, and then asking even more questions. Once you’ve done that, and know how to find the right people to work with – watch out – your business will grow by leaps and bounds.