Go MLM Online Blog — MLM for People Who Want to Market Their Business Online

Online MLM: Why I Would Rather Scare You than Lie to You

by Stephanie Valentine on February 4, 2010

I scare a lot of people who ask me for tips and help for their online MLM business. I don’t mean to scare them, but sometimes the truth is scary.

For instance, the truth about what it takes to develop a visible and interesting online presence can frighten people. So can the truth about how many hours it takes to ramp your knowledge and climb up the learning curve.

But I’d rather scare you than lie to you.

The Truth About Online MLM
The online world can be vastly different from the “real world,” but in some ways it is very similar. Remember in the old days when you used to “paper the town” to establish a presence for your MLM business? You might run ads, hang flyers, mail out tapes, and work trade shows?

Well, you do the same in online MLM, only you don’t “paper” the town, you spread the word about your business digitally. You blog, comment on other people’s blogs, submit articles, join online forums, and work social media platforms. It’s the same as papering the town, only in electronic form.

And, it takes just as much time and effort to get known in the online world as it did to “paper the town” in the old days.

The Bottom Line About Working an Online MLM Business
At the end of the day, the division between people who truly want to work their MLM business and those who don’t is still there, online and offline. The ones who want to create a truly passive ongoing income stream know that it takes consistent effort over a number of years to achieve the end goal. And they are ready to put in the sweat equity.

Those who just want to work MLM as a sideline business or like the business for its social aspects will find the effort required scary, horrifying, and way too much work. They don’t want to get their hands dirty.

What Does it Really Take to Do Online MLM?
So what is it that so scares people who ask me for help? Well, I’ll give you the list I give to just about everyone and you can see if it scares you. There is no “secret formula,” just varieties on the same theme. For the list below, you can either do it yourself, or you can pay someone to do it for you. Just be forewarned that if you pay someone to do it for you, it will cost you quite a bit, $250 per month and up. So here’s what it takes:

1. Establish a home base: A blog is the easiest way to create a home base. Here is where you talk about whatever you are passionate about that relates to your business, whether it’s the products, the passive income, or both. Post a minimum of once a week to your blog, and with good stuff, too. No filler junk. Write quality content or no one will read your blog.

2. Ping Your Blog: Pinging is a way to alert blog search engines like Technorati that you have a new blog post. Every time you post a new entry to your blog, use a service like Pingoat or Pingomatic to “ping” your blog.

3. Submit to Article Directories: Submit your best blog posts to article directories. Be sure to follow their editorial guidelines closely to avoid rejected submissions. If you only have time to submit to a single directory, go with EzineArticles. They have enormous traffic. Their editorial guidelines are tough, but if you follow them to the letter you WILL get a lot of traffic from your submissions.

4. Feed Your Blog to Social Media: Whether you do this manually or use an automated service, send a feed of your blog to social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. This tells people in your social media circle when you have a new blog post, and helps spread the word about your business.

5. Feed Your Social Media Circle: At least once a week, add friends or followers or buddies to your social media circle. Whether you ask for a recommendation on LinkedIn or follow new people on Twitter, increase your online “reach” weekly.

6. Always Look for New Keywords and Niches: At least once a month, use a tool like Google Keyword Search or Twitter Search to look for new keywords or niches. A good keyword phrase in the Google tool has at least 1,000 hits and low competition. On Twitter Search, search for new hashtags (#) that relate to your business. Once you find a new keyword or hashtag, incorporate these into your blog posts or tweets.

7. Check Your Stats: On a weekly basis, check your stats using Google Analytics or some other traffic statistics tool. You want to look for spikes in traffic, and then determine what caused the spike. Was it a particularly good blog post or a blog title that really struck a chord? Did you make a special offer? Did you finally gain some “critical mass” on a social media platform? If you don’t check, you won’t know what’s working, so you’re basically flying blind. So take the time to check … it will keep you from wasting time on stuff that isn’t working.

Online MLM and the Truth: Did I Scare You?
Well, did I? I hope not. But as I said, I’d rather scare you than lie to you about what it takes to be found online. It’s not that bad, is it? There are 7 items on a single list. It’s also what any successful online MLM business builder will tell you on a forum or if you email them for help. There are no secrets. There’s just straightforward effort … smart effort. It takes 7 to 20 hours per week to get your online MLM business up and running, and generating passive income. The level of effort is no different than offline MLM. It’s the truth. Honest.

Make sense?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader. Or contact me if you want to join our MLM team. We are teaching people to dive into online MLM head first … successfully! I’m holding out for a few good people. Really.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/orcmid/ / CC BY 2.0

Share and Enjoy:

{ 1 comment }

Doing Online MLM Sanely with Da Plan

by Stephanie Valentine on February 2, 2010

Doing online MLM is one thing. Doing it with your sanity intact is quite another.

That’s why, if you are going to promote your MLM business online, you need “da plan.”

“Da plan” is an organized, effective, and productive approach to online MLM that produces results with a fixed amount of effort weekly.

What will a plan do for you? Here are just few benefits to consider.

Having a plan will:

prevent you from losing hours of your life reading oddball tweets
keep you from feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed, thus accomplishing nada
make you feel like you know what you are doing (even if you don’t, yet)
give you actual hard target goals to aim for, which are in reasonable reach
break tasks down into itty-bitty pieces so you can promote even on days when you are suffering from serial brain farts

Da plan is sounding pretty good, right?

So What is in the Online MLM Plan?
You have to decide for yourself exactly what goes into your own online MLM plan, but the basics remain the same:

adding content to your blog or website
promoting your content to various social media sites
creating and maintaining relationships on social media sites
submitting content to various directories
commenting on other people’s content

There are a lot of ways you can mix and match the items from the list above to match your personality, time limits, budget constraints, and, let’s not forget, mental capacity. Try to do too much in online MLM marketing and you will lose your sanity, guaranteed … and fast!

Creating Your Own Online MLM Plan
Once you’ve figured out the pieces that are going to be part of your online promotion, the next thing is to create a plan. The plan can actually be quite simple, and be nothing more than a checklist.

For instance, suppose you wanted to keep things simple and chose only the following marketing avenues for your online promotion effort:

To create your online MLM marketing plan, all you have to do is create a checklist that might look something like this:

Mondays and Wednesdays
- research and write a blog post, which includes researching facts, links, and keywords (45 minutes)
- get on Twitter and respond to direct messages and mentions (15 minutes)
- retweet at least twice (5 minutes)
TOTAL TIME: 1 hour and 5 minutes

Tuesday and Thursdays
- post the blog content written the day before, including appropriate tags, categories, and pictures (15 minutes)
- ping your blog to let blog search engines know you have a new post (2 minutes)
- submit your article to EzineArticles (15 minutes)
- get on Twitter and respond to direct messages and mentions (15 minutes)
- retweet at least twice (5 minutes)
TOTAL TIME: 52 minutes

Friday
- use Follow Friday on Twitter to follow at least 25 new people (20 minutes)
- respond to new messages and mentions on Twitter (15 minutes)
- retweet at least twice
- plan your editorial calendar of blog posts for the following week (25 minutes)
TOTAL TIME: 1 hour

Da Plan is a Checklist and Timetable
As you can see, an online MLM plan isn’t all that complicated. It breaks down your online marketing plan into segments that take roughly an hour per day. That’s not much. Of course, most of this is outgoing communication on your part (aside from answering messages and responding to mentions on Twitter).

Aside from this timetable, you also have to set aside time to answer emails and phone calls from prospects and downline members. You need to schedule extra time as well for attending trainings, reading books, and basically increasing your knowledge of the industry, your company, your team, your niche, and your products.

But, you can use the same approach for these kinds of tasks as well. Just add to the checklist you have already started for your outgoing communications. No big deal.

See how having a plan can make online MLM marketing so much easier and more manageable? It’s important to create and work from a plan, and to teach your people to do the same.

Why? Because insane people are very hard to work with!

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivanwalsh/ / CC BY 2.0

Share and Enjoy:

{ 2 comments }

Is MLM Income Truly Passive?

by Stephanie Valentine on January 28, 2010

MLM is a great way to create another income stream, which provides a comforting financial buffer in this economy. But it can also take a lot of time, and in an economy when people are working two and three jobs simultaneously, time is also a precious resource.

Thus it becomes important to ask, “Is MLM income truly passive?”

So whether you are already deep into your MLM business or are just considering joining an MLM business, it pays to ask some questions before investing a lot of time into a business. Who should you ask?

Your upline if you are already working an MLM business, or your potential upline if you have yet to join.

Asking Your Upline about Whether Their MLM Income is Passive
Passive income has always been touted as one of the biggest benefits of owning an MLM business. Having a passive income means that once you have built you business, you can walk away for certain periods of time and still receive that income.

After all, in the MLM infomercials you see people vacationing for weeks at a time in some tropical paradise. You see them spending lots of “quality time” with their family. You see them doing everything but business. So it is implied, if not stated outright, that an MLM business produces a fairly passive income stream.

Your job is to find out whether this is true for your MLM company and your upline.

The question to ask your upline is whether the income they are earning is truly passive. Specifically, ask them:

Would they feel comfortable walking away from their business entirely for periods of time and still earn the majority of their monthly MLM income?
How long would they feel comfortable walking away from their business, knowing that their income stream would continue?
Do their prospecting and management methods allow their downline to earn a passive stream of income? In other words, you want to find out whether the promotional methods they teach allow you to walk away from your business, or whether you are tied to the phone 24/7.
How long did it take them to build an income stream that they felt comfortable walking away from for periods of time?
Has the parent company every changed the compensation plan so that a passive income stream became non-passive (meaning they could no longer walk away from the business for periods of time)?
If their MLM income is not totally passive, what kind of effort do they have to put into their business monthly to earn their income?
At the end of the day, do they truly believe that the income stream from their MLM business is and should be passive?

Are Your Upline’s Answers about Passive Income True?
Depending on the kind of relationship you have with your upline, you may or may not get direct answers to these questions, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask. Doing due diligence on any small business is just plain smart.

If your direct upline has not been in the business for very long, you may want to check in with your upline three or four levels above you. These people are likely to have achieved the top levels in the compensation plan, and can more accurately give you the answers to the questions above.

In my experience, an upline business builder who has successfully mentored many people has nothing to hide, and will be happy to provide truthful answers. Potential upline sponsors are a different story. They may be less than truthful in answering these pointed questions. They may give vague answers or evade the questions altogether.

My advice? If you have yet to join an MLM but are considering it, be persistent in the pursuit of these answers. It can make a big difference in the return on investment for your efforts in your MLM business.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24350382@N07/ / CC BY 2.0

Share and Enjoy:

{ 0 comments }

Online MLM: 3 Steps to Take if No One is Reading Your Blog

by Stephanie Valentine on January 26, 2010

You built your online MLM blog … and no one came. What a total bummer!

Luckily, there are 3 simple steps you can take to bring more traffic to your blog. And when I say simple, I do mean simple. Even the least geekiest MLMer can do this. Really. Trust me, I’ve seen it happen.

Online MLM Blog Promotion Step #1: Ping It
This is a simple step that most beginner bloggers don’t know about. Pinging is a service that let’s blog search engines like Technorati know that you have a new post on your blog. Every time you post something new to your blog, just ping it. By pinging your blog, you send the message out to multiple blog search engines.

This helps because once you ping a search engine, it will crawl your blog and include new entries in its database. And while your blog may not have much prominence on the web, search engines like Technorati do. That means when someone searches for a topic you have been writing about, they may not find you directly, but they probably will find you via a blog search engine. Instant recognition!

There are multiple pinging services out there, and almost all of them are free. Pingomatic and Pingoat both work well. You just program in your blog name, link, and rss feed, as well as choose the search engines you want to ping, and hit “Go.” You then bookmark the resulting page (the page that shows up after you hit the “Go” button). Then, the next time you post to your blog, just go to that bookmarked page. It prevents you from having to re-program all your blog data each time.

Once you have programmed your blog data into a pinging service, it takes about 3 seconds to ping your blog each time. Three seconds to instant fame. Now that’s simple. Do it now, before you forget.

Online MLM Blog Promotion Step #2: Tweet It
When you write a good blog post, tweet about it on Twitter. Or program your blog feed to automatically tweet about it. Either way, spread the word about your blog post to people in who follow you. This helps bring people who are interested in your writing to your blog site.

Assuming that only people who are interested in what you have to say are following you, by tweeting about your blog post you are speaking to a targeted audience. This audience is more likely to “click through” to your blog than the general internet audience. Again, this helps you be found in an ocean of blog posts (1 million blog posts are published every 24 hours). If you do this step manually, it takes a maximum of 5 seconds. Definitely a worthwhile effort.

Online MLM Blog Promotion Step #3: Post to EzineArticles
EzineArticles is the most popular article directory on the web and, without a doubt, can drive a huge amount of traffic to your blog. Of course, you have to have good content, which means content that is truly useful, usable, practical, helpful, or humorous for this to work. You also have to follow the editorial guidelines VERY carefully.

Submit your best blog posts to EzineArticles. Be sure to provide solid keywords and a catchy description to go with your article. Also, write a strong bio for your account and fill out your profile completely. There are guidelines on how to do all of this on the EzineArticles site. Follow their guidelines and you will be surprised at how many people not only read your articles, but then click through to your blog to read more.

3 Simple Steps for Online MLM Blog Promotion
These steps are very, very simple to do. But you have to do them consistently for them to work. Day in, day out, do these three steps for every worthy blog post and people will find you. It isn’t as hard as you think.

Being found online isn’t about heavy effort, it’s about consistent effort.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anniemole/ / CC BY 2.0

Share and Enjoy:

{ 2 comments }

Online MLM: Why It Is Important to Prioritize Your Activities

by Stephanie Valentine on January 21, 2010

So you have this great online MLM marketing plan and then you totally bomb.

Life happens and a week passes before you realize that you haven’t done anything that you planned to do. What now? Easy …

Get back to basics.

The Importance of Basics in Online MLM
It’s really easy to become overwhelmed with an online MLM marketing campaign. When you create your plan, it all sounds so simple. It looks simple on paper. For instance, a recent DVD I watched on creating such a plan advised people to use the following online platforms to promote their businesses:

- Blog
- LinkedIn
- Facebook
- Twitter

That looks really simple, right? After all, it’s only four things. These days, any competent MLM multi-tasker should be able to handle four simple tasks, especially if you have a laptop, a web-capable phone, and other handy tools.

Not.

Doing online MLM consistently is like creating a new habit. It takes time. You run into discouraging roadblocks. You need a lot of persistence. That’s why it’s important to prioritize your online activities so that you CAN go back to basics when life goes haywire, which it will … that’s a guarantee.

How to Prioritize Your Online MLM Activities
Suppose you are following the four-item plan outlines above. How do you prioritize those activities? The most important item on that list is easy to pick out: your blog. Your blog is your online MLM home base while the other three social media platforms are media outposts that drive traffic back to your blog. Your home base outranks your media outposts because driving traffic to an empty home base is just silly.

So your blog is #1. That means that when everything goes to hell in a hand basket and you’ve neglected your online MLM business, you go back to your blog. That’s the most basic part of your online strategy. Start from there. If you planned to post to you blog twice a week, but haven’t posted for 2 weeks, then your first priority is to write two blog posts for the current week. Then write 2 more blog posts for the coming week to make sure you stay on track.

Once you are done writing, go back and look at the other social media platforms. To figure out how to prioritize these, ask yourself the following questions:

- Which one is easiest for you to handle?
- Which one gives you the least technical trouble?
- Which one do you enjoy “playing with” the most?
- Which one brings you the most promising leads and most productive interaction?

Based on these questions, you should be able to put your media outposts in order of importance.

For instance, I know one online MLM business builder who is very fast and productive on Twitter. She’s direct and to-the-point, and doesn’t enjoy a lot of excessive chatting. She likes the 140-character limit on tweets. On the other hand, she finds LinkedIn difficult to navigate, and often has to spend up to 30 minutes asking for a recommendation or finding a question to answer. Facebook falls somewhere in the middle, being easy to navigate but not producing as much activity as Twitter. So her media outposts rank, in order of importance this way:

1. Twitter
2. Facebook
3. LinkedIn

Does that make sense to you? Based on these questions you should be able to easily rank your online activities to promote your MLM business. Better still, when you find yourself off track, having a prioritized list will help you get back to basics, and get right back on track.

Best of all, this “back to basics” approach keeps you from getting overwhelmed and deciding that the online MLM thing is “all to much.” When people get there, they tend to chuck the whole thing in the trash … and walk away from a golden opportunity.

What a waste! Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater when life gets in the way of your online MLM business. Just get back to basics!

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/redvers/ / CC BY 2.0

Share and Enjoy:

{ 3 comments }

Online MLM: 7 Things to do if You Only Have 20 Minutes

by Stephanie Valentine on January 19, 2010

We live in the age of splintered time where 20 minutes is considered a pretty good-sized chunk of time. Luckily, if you run an online MLM business, there are lots of productive things you can do to support and grow your business in just 20 minutes. Here are 7 that come to mind. Ready? Here goes.

7 Online MLM Quickies

1. Locate Trouble Areas for Newbies to Online MLM
Whether you pick up the phone or zip out some emails, contact your folks who are new to online MLM and find out where they are having trouble. Jot these problem areas down in a list. You may want to do a training to help your newbies get over the hurdle, or you may want to write a blog series about it. You might even want to write an ebook about it.

2. Expand Your Twitter Circle
Assuming you already get on Twitter most days to answer direct messages, post tweets, answer tweets from others, and retweet others, you always need to spend at least 20 minutes a week expanding your circle of contacts. Using hashtags (#) is a simple way to locate people who share similar interests.

For example, I’m a horse addict and I’ve found 21 hashtags that relate to horses. These range from the most basic (#horse) to the more complicated (#naturalhorsemanship). To use hashtags, simply go to Twitter’s search feature and enter your hashtags. If you don’t know which hashtags to use, go with your best guess. Hashtags are kind of like keywords. They are the words people use most frequently relative to a particular topic. Learn more about hashtags here.

Once Twitter serves up the people using those hashtags, follow them. Also check to see who they are following and who is following them. You will find a wealth of people there who share your interests.

3. Surf the Web for Ideas for Your Online MLM Editorial Calendar
Writing day in and day out can get dull after a while, and if you are feeling dull your editorial calendar will show it. If you’ve been pretty bored recently with what you have been writing, it’s time for an injection of new ideas. Visit blog sites like Technorati or Alltop to see what other people are writing about. Visit Google’s blog search to do the same. Then jot down any fresh ideas. Since you only have 20 minutes, stick with writing down ideas. You can research them later.

4. Find 3 Amazing Facts Related to Your Online MLM Business
People love to read about weird, wacky, amazing, hard-to-believe facts. People love blog posts that start with “Did you know …?” People love to be amazed. If you’ve got 20 minutes, surf the web or drag out a book or read an ebook. Whatever. Find 3 amazing facts about your online MLM business, your company’s products, or the MLM industry that you can use to amaze your readers. Amazing facts always make for a good read.

5. Invite a Guest Blogger
Is there a blogger out there you really admire? Do you really like his message? Then email him a quick invitation and ask him to be a guest blogger on your site. If he’s got a well-known name, having him as a guest blogger will lend credibility to your blog. Be sure to include any specific topic that you would like him to write about, and tell him the focus of your blog. It never hurts to ask. Sometimes it can be as simple as posting a blog he’s already written on your blog, giving proper credit and a good intro, and pointing back to his blog.

6. Find Good Online MLM Resources for Newbies
Newbies to online MLM need all the help they can get. They need resources, inspiration, help with writing, motivation to write, and ways to stay organized. If you’ve being doing online MLM for a while, you’ve probably got a bunch of tools in your toolkit. Share these with your newbies, but also look for new resources. Your tools may be too advanced for a newbie, so see if you can find some simpler tools for them to use. Some examples include Google Keyword Search, blogs that instruct people on how to write blog posts (Chris Brogan, Problogger, Copyblogger), and Memo To Me (an online software that sends email reminders to help your newbies stay organized).

7. Comment on Other People’s Blogs
This is one way to spread the word about your own online MLM blog, and generate links that point back to your blog. Be sure to compose well-written thoughtful comments that add something informative to the conversation. Avoid just promoting your blog. Your goal is to demonstrate your expertise so that people will want to visit your blog, not just put up a sign pointing to your blog. If you can only write a single informative comment in 20 minutes, then do just that. One good comment is worth a million lousy ones.

See? You can do a LOT in 20 minutes if you know how. So if you’ve got 20 spare minutes, don’t twiddle your thumbs. Do something toward growing your online MLM presence instead.

If you do 20 minutes a day and the results will be shockingly good!

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/uair01/ / CC BY 2.0

Share and Enjoy:

{ 5 comments }

Online MLM: What to Do if You Are Stuck on Stupid

by Stephanie Valentine on January 14, 2010

Do you have days when you have zero creativity and nothing to write? Then you, my friend, are stuck on stupid. But don’t worry. It happens to all online MLM folks from time to time.

If you have been blogging, writing articles, posting comments, and otherwise working your online MLM business steadily for a while, you are bound to run into a brick wall at some point.

Call it writer’s block, being stuck in park, whatever you want. Whatever you call it, you’ve got nothing.

Yup, your mental gearshift is stuck on stupid.

How to Avoid Being Stuck on Stupid in Online MLM
One of the best ways I have found to prevent this little (or big) problem is this:

Learn one big thing once a week or once a month.

To keep those creative juices flowing for your MLM business, you need to keep learning. Otherwise you’ll end up writing the same thing over and over. And, depending on the rate at which you work your business, you need to learn one big thing, either once a week or once a month.

So what’s the one big thing you should learn? You pick. Choose something relevant to your online MLM business, whether that’s financial literacy, online marketing methods, how to create an ebook, or ways to improve your writing skills.

I pick one big thing to learn once a month, not once a week, but the things I pick are usually pretty big. For instance, I recently bought a 300-page ebook on financial literacy. It’s going to take me a month to plow through the ebook and implement the ideas I like. Last month, I took a freebie email course on social media. Again, it took me the whole month to digest all the ideas in the course AND implement the ideas that struck a chord with me.

Now it’s your turn.
Start now.
Pick one big thing to learn, even if you’re not stuck on stupid at the moment.

Choose to read Robert Kiyosaki or plow through Chris Brogan’s blog. Try Kim Klaver’s stuff for a fresh look at MLM in general. Choose to read the back issues of Networking Times, or take Ramit Sethi’s 30-day financial challenge. Read up on Twitter hashtags or ways to feed your blog into your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Whatever strikes your fancy.

Pick something and have it handy because no matter what is going on in your online MLM business right now, one day you, too, will be stuck on stupid. And then you’ll need that one big thing.

Got it? Good. Now go get it.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hiddedevries/ / CC BY 2.0

Share and Enjoy:

{ 1 comment }

Online MLM and Keywords: Important Now but Less So Later

by Stephanie Valentine on January 12, 2010

Location, location, location matters in the offline world.

Keywords, keywords, keywords matter in the online world because keywords are how you get found.

For most online MLM newbies, the importance of keywords is drummed into them from day one. And it’s true. Keywords are crucial to being found. Thus every online MLM newbie spends hours researching keywords, putting them strategic places in blog posts … ad nauseum.

The Good News About Keywords and Online MLM
If you’ve been busily sprinkling all the right “keywords” into your blog posts, throughout your website, and anywhere you post about online MLM, good for you. If you are sick and tired of doing so, I don’t blame you. This task does get a little repetitive, not to mention boring, tedious, nauseating … the list could go on.

But nevertheless having the right keywords for your online MLM niche, and a rich density of those keywords, is really important when you first start. It’s the way search engines recognize the “expertise” and “relevance” of your site. So buckle down, you have to do it.

Now for the good news:

Once your site is recognized by search engines as being relevant and informative in your MLM niche, you don’t have to focus so much on keywords anymore.

Cool, huh?

The Importance of Character Posts in Online MLM
It’s not that the importance of keywords goes away forever, but when your MLM blog or website starts getting strong steady traffic, you can begin writing some blog posts and articles that are more freestyle, less rigid, and less centered around keywords. You can start writing what I call “character posts,” posts that define your online character and personality.

These posts are more fun to write, and help you stand out from the crowd, especially the MLM online crowd. In an online world filled with generic “company approved” template websites, character posts and articles that demonstrate why people should join YOUR donwline are important.

But you can’t start writing too many of those until your blog and website have some prominence and traffic. At present there are 1 trillion websites and 1 million new blog posts every single day. That’s a lot of competition. Until your website gains some popularity, you’ll need to do the keyword thing.

All popular bloggers started this way. Go back and read the beginning posts from people like Chris Brogan and Jon Jantsch and you’ll see a lot of keyword density. But if you read their posts now, you’ll see a lot of character posts because they have a huge following. Get it?

To recap:

In the beginning, you MUST write keyword-rich content. Later, when you have a huge targeted following, you can switch to character posts.

In the meantime, if the “keyword thing” is driving you ’round the bend, write as many keyword-dense posts as you can, and intersperse some character posts in between. It will give you a little relief, and start building your online personality for the world to see.

Enjoy!

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/ / CC BY 2.0

Share and Enjoy:

{ 3 comments }

The Problem with Reading about Online MLM

by Stephanie Valentine on January 7, 2010

I just finished reading a great ebook about doing online MLM. The ebook had lots of helpful tips, as well as success stories about people who have developed a wonderful passive income stream doing online MLM. The whole ebook was great except for one thing:

There is a world of difference between reading about online MLM and doing it.

What Reading Novels and Reading about Online MLM Have in Common
Don’t get me wrong, I love to read about online MLM. I love that other people read what I write about this business. That’s not the problem. The problem happens when people actually get online, sign up for their blog and social media accounts, and start doing their MLM business online. That’s when the problems crop up. Why?

Let me give you an example. I read this sentence in the ebook on doing MLM online:

“Bob followed this approach, and six months later, moved three levels up his MLM company’s compensation plan.”

That sounds great, right? Bob’s approach was to write a couple of blogs and work three social media platforms. No big deal. And he moved three levels up the compensation plan. That’s great. After all, who can’t do what Bob did for six months, right?

Wrong.

And that’s what reading about online MLM and reading novels share in common: it’s too easy. It is soooooo easy to read about some black-ops superhero kicking butt in a novel, with his special tools, his martial arts moves, and his network of connections. It’s easy to read, hard to do.

Ditto with online MLM. It’s soooooo easy to read about Bob, who just easily taps out six blog posts a week for his two blogs (one for product and one for business), and who handles all of his social media “networking” with ease. So not happening … unless Bob is a psycho workaholic who just LOVES to spend all of his time on the computer after he comes home from his day job. Not.

See, it took only one sentence to write about Bob’s six month’s worth of grueling effort. It takes only one second to read the words “six months later.” But the truth of the matter is, Bob spent six months slaving away. See what I mean? See the difference between one second’s worth of reading and six month’s worth of effort?

Somehow, our brains translate the effort it takes to read ABOUT online MLM into the effort we think it will actually take to do online MLM. It only took a second to read the words, so how hard could it be? That’s what we say to ourselves, all the time. Really.

Online MLM in the Real World
So let’s get down to brass tacks for a minute and talk about doing your MLM business online, in the real world, not in Bob’s superhero world. Is what Bob doing possible? Yes. Is it probable? No. Is the average Joe likely to be able to follow Bob’s path. Nuh-uh.

So what is possible, probable, and likely for the average Joe who wants to do MLM online? Well, here are the facts about online MLM as I understand them based on my real-world experience:

1. Online MLM takes as much time and effort as any other small business. The main difference is that your overhead is much lower than the average bricks and mortar startup storefront.

2. Online MLM is a skill, like any other. Just because you are online doesn’t mean you don’t have to network, build trust, make friends, influence people, etc. You have to do all of that, plus you have to learn to do it in the online world, which has its own set of rules.

3. Keep your day job, if you have one. You don’t need as much capital as you would for a regular startup small business, but you still need cashflow because unless you are a psycho workaholic, you are not going to hit the top of the compensation plan in six months.

Reading about Online MLM: My Advice
After a decade of doing MLM online, my advice is that you should definitely keep reading and learning about doing this business online. Or listening to CDs or watching DVDs. Whatever floats your boat.

The thing is, whenever you run across a sentence, or even an entire article that talks about someone’s success, don’t be tempted to think that it was EVER easy. It NEVER is. Online MLM can create an immensely steady passive income for you. It can be developed into a financial asset. It can do a lot of things. But it takes as much effort as anything else in the world.

So … do keep reading. Just don’t be fooled. Unless the article you are reading describes the blood, sweat, and tears it took a person to reach success in gory detail, learn what you can from the article, but don’t be lulled into the idea that MLM is “rags to riches” with no effort.

Just a word of warning to the wise. I love MLM and I love online MLM even more. I just don’t want MLM to have a bad name in your book because you aren’t a millionaire, or even a thousandaire, in six months.

Slow steady effort is the key. Want to know how I do it? Drop me a line and I’ll tell you!

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader. Or contact me if you want to join an MLM team that is teaching people to dive into online MLM head first … successfully! I’m holding out for a few good people. Really.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/43602175@N06/ / CC BY 2.0

Share and Enjoy:

{ 3 comments }

Online MLM Is Not About Will Power: Think Structure Instead

by Stephanie Valentine on January 5, 2010

Will power is great. The only problem is that you eventually run out of the stuff. And a lot of online MLM newbies do just that. They run out of will power and quit the business, which is a crying shame.

The reason it’s a crying shame isn’t because someone has quit your group and now you have lost a business builder. Nope. It’s a crying shame because the online MLM newbie had to rely on will power to build their business.

If you want to do MLM for the long haul, then will power isn’t going to get you there. You still need will power, but the thing that is really going to carry you through is this:

Structure.

The Force of Structure versus the Power of Will
The power of structure is something that I have recently remembered because I have been reading Ramit Sethi’s blog on wealth and finance. It’s really good stuff, and it examines a lot of the reasons that people fail at what they want to achieve.

For instance, why do 95% of dieters fail to lose weight and keep it off? Why do only a small percentage of people sign up for the employer check match for their 401(k)? It is, after all, free money. And yet, very few people take advantage of that.

Why?

This is where the big “Aha!” moment appeared for me. The answer to all of these “Why?” questions is lack of structure, not lack of will power. Basically, Ramit’s message is this:

“If you want to achieve something, set yourself up for success by creating a structure that makes the hard thing easy and the easy thing hard.”

A Horse Training Example
Now this isn’t big news or anything. Anyone familiar with horse training or dog training knows this. If you want your horse to perform a certain task, like move at a pleasant speed rather than going at the speed of light, you have to make going slow easy for the horse, and also make going fast difficult for the horse. This is a problem encountered with a lot of ex-racehorses, or horses who just like to run.

To achieve slower speeds, you offer a carrot and a stick. The stick comes into play when the horse goes into his high-speed mode. How do you apply the stick? You encourage the horse to go even faster than he is already going. Running fast may be easy for the horse, but running faster is more difficult and more tiring. Eventually, the horse will get tired and want to stop. You keep applying the stick by not letting him stop. Instead you make him keep running at the higher speed for a few more circles, until he really wants to stop. You allow him to stop, and then walk him around until he has caught his breath.

Now you try for the carrot. You ask your horse to move off again. If he immediately goes into high speed, apply the stick. Stop, rest, and repeat. Once your horse is willing to move off at a moderate speed, which is bound to happen eventually, you give him a carrot by only making him do one or two circles. Then you get off and he gets to go play in the pasture.

So that is a long-winded example of how the use of the carrot and stick as a way to create structure. I use a horse as an example because it can difficult to communicate to a horse that he must use will power to accomplish something, so we use the structure of the carrot and the stick instead. We humans can use will power, but we shouldn’t rely on it like we do. Instead, we should, like the horse, rely on structure to make the hard thing easy and the easy thing hard in our online MLM business.

How to Create Structure in Your Online MLM Business
So how do you apply the carrot and stick to your online MLM business to create structure so you don’t have to rely so much on will power? It’s not difficult, and in fact, most of the structural pieces that have worked best for me are quite simple. For instance, I blog and write a lot of articles (multiple ones daily). I’ve been doing it for about a decade now. Sometimes I feel like I run out of things to say because, well, I’ve been saying lots of stuff for a long time now. Plus, I do writing for clients as well.

In the past, when I’ve felt I had nothing to write about, I would power through that writer’s block with will. Well, today I’ve run out of that kind of will power, plus I don’t enjoy using that kind of force to “push through “blockages anymore.

Today I’ve set up structures that make writing quite effortless. Here are a few pieces of the structure that helps me write more easily:

1. Set Up Google Reader
I set up a Google Reader account and it receives RSS feeds from my favorite bloggers on all kinds of topics including:

- MLM
- online marketing
- the state of the economy
- stuff from my upline and parent company
- the state of the MLM industry (including who’s growing and who’s failing)
- health topics (since my MLM product is health-related)
- some strange tidbits thrown in for entertainment

This means that I don’t always have to come up with new material … I just open up my Google Reader and voila! Tons of information and inspiration. I can comment on other people’s blogs, get inspired by ideas they are proposing, or, if I’m in a strange mood, use the strange tidbits as a launching place. Having all this stuff at my fingertips makes writing (the hard thing) much easier.

2. Do a Research Day in Bed
One day a week I treat myself to a morning in bed. It’s actually scheduled on my calendar. I get up later than usual, turn off the phone, stay in my PJs, and drag my computer to bed with me. Then I get online and do any research I need to do for blogs I plan to write in the future. Sometimes this means looking up facts and figures. Other times, it means finding just the right quote or right picture to go with a particular blog post. Yet other times, this means scouring the web and other offline resources for topics for my editorial calendars (for both my stuff and my clients’ stuff).

This scheduled time acts as a “carrot” in my online MLM structure. Even though I am working, it feels more like a lazy Sunday and I don’t mind one bit. This “carrot” is how I make the hard thing (research) feel easy.

3. Stash Cheetos, Cigars, and Bubble Bath at the Other End of the House
This part of the structure makes the easy thing (slacking off) hard. I love Cheetos, a good cigar (really), and taking bubble baths. So, to prevent myself from pigging out in the bathtub with a good cigar in hand, I stash all of these items at the other end of the house. In fact, I put them all in the plant room, a room which has a swinging gate with a latch that won’t work unless all the planets are in alignment.

That latch has hacked me off enough times that I won’t go near it unless I’m ready to get mad. Needless to say, the Cheetos, cigars, and bubble baths are now rendered difficult, if not impossible. No will power needed there.

You See What I Mean About Structure?
I’ve taken deliberate steps to make the writing (the hard thing) easy with Google Reader and a comfy morning in bed. And the easy thing of avoidance? Well, the gate to the plant room pretty much makes getting to the goodies difficult if not totally impossible.

All of these are fairly simple structural things I’ve put in place so I don’t have to use will power to do my business. There are a lot more structural ideas, too, but this article is already far too long so I won’t bore you with the details. Hopefully you get the idea.

What about you? Have you discovered some fabulous ways to use structure rather than willpower to grow your online MLM business?

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fdecomite/ / CC BY 2.0

Share and Enjoy: