I just read a great article by Jordan Adler on leadership in “Networking Times.” His main point is that MLM leaders help their people get started, but they don’t spend all their time “working with their people.” What’s the difference?
Helping someone “get started” means showing them the ropes, modeling business success, and then letting them figure out how best to work their business. “Working with” someone means dragging, pushing, and prodding them along every single step of the way. The “working with” approach not only sucks, it doesn’t work.
So what’s the point of all this?
When it comes to your online MLM business, your sponsor can help you get started, but only you can keep it going. Your sponsor can help you “get started” by teaching you the mechanics of an online presence, such as:
- setting up a website or blog
- using social media like Twitter or LinkedIn
- promoting your business with article marketing
That’s all well and good, but it won’t necessarily bring you customers or help you grow your business right away. Even if you learn to do all the steps of online MLM marketing, you won’t go far until you develop your own online voice. Your online voice is the way you express yourself. It’s your personality in print. It’s you translated into a digital format. It’s what helps you stand out among the gazillions of other online marketers out there.
What’s Your Online MLM Voice?
You are the only one who can really figure who you want to be online. Are you going to be a comedic teacher? The beauty queen with a brain? The plumber with common sense? The foul-mouthed floozie?
Your sponsor might be able to give you some ideas for your online MLM personality to get you started, but ultimately you have to figure it out for yourself. How do you figure it out? It’s just like washing your hair:
Lather, rinse, repeat. Lather, rinse, repeat. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Get the picture? That means you put stuff out there, see what sticks, learn a little, then repeat. When I first got started, one of my online mentors, who has a very well-known online presence, told me it might take 50-100 articles/blog posts before I really found a voice that worked for me. Ouch, I cringed when I heard that. That’s a lot of writing, rinsing, and repeating.
On the other hand, in online MLM marketing, finding your voice is your real work. You might think that online marketing is about researching stuff to write about or following a bunch of people on Twitter. Nope, it’s not. Any monkey can do that. You still have to do all that, but first you have to find a voice. What you say isn’t as important as how you say it.
How will you know when you’ve found your online voice?
- Check out the “7 Ways You Know You Have Found Your Online Marketing Voice” article.
- Look up your article statistics. Are they getting better?
- Check out your online traffic. Is it increasing?
Most of all, ask yourself whether you like the way you sound? Are you enjoying your writing? For me, I know my voice is “coming through” in my online MLM marketing when I really like what I write. The writing flows easily. The ideas come quickly. The joy is there. I know I’m being my authentic real self online. When it’s not, I know what to do:
Lather, rinse, repeat.
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Photo credit: hanekam
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