A what? A spent hen? Yeah, I just learned that term myself. Came through from Reveries’ Cool News of the Day (find them here).
Anyway, even though the news on “spent hens” reported by Cool News was not very cool, the concept made me think of some MLM newbies.
So first thing’s first. What in the heck is a “spent hen”?
A spent hen is a hen that no longer produces eggs, and thus must be “culled” from the herd. Spent hens are usually bony, malnourished, exhausted, and infested with salmonella. Oh yes, and most have osteoporosis. Ick!
Unfortunately, many an online MLM newbie dives into an online marketing campaign with verve only to emerge a month later looking like a spent hen, osteoporosis and all (from craning their necks perpetually toward their computer screens!).
If you feel like a spent online MLM hen, the first step is to try to straighten your spine. Next, follow these three steps.
3 Steps to Avoid Feeling Like a Spent Hen in Online MLM
Those feeling like spent hens are victims of the “too much, too fast” approach to online MLM. It happens all the time in MLM, not just in online MLM. If you have been in MLM for a while, then you probably remember the tape system. Well, there were spent hens back then, too, only they were drowning in mountains of tapes, labels, and padded envelopes.
If you are a spent hen because of online MLM, you are lucky. You aren’t surrounded by a bunch of tapes and other junk you’ll eventually have to get rid of. Almost everything is virtual. But you are a spent hen nevertheless, so what should you do?
Step #1: Slim Down the Marketing Plan
I’ve said this before, but I’ll keep saying it until online marketing newbies stop looking like spent hens. Yes, there are multiple ways to market online and they all look exciting. But you are only one person and you have to climb a learning curve on each and every marketing technique.
So, to conserve your strength, pick one marketing avenue you want to pursue online (and OK, if you are total Type-A freak like me, pick two). Pick a technique that matches your personality and decide to stick with it for six months to a year (trust me, it takes that long to get good at even one online MLM technique).
Don’t worry about all those other online marketing avenues. They’ll still be there when you’ve finished mastering your one chose approach.
Step #2: Decide Where You Suck the Most
No one is born an online MLM expert, so when we start using any given marketing technique, we suck. No ifs, ands, or buts about it! That’s not in question. The real question you want to ask yourself is this:
“Where do I suck the most when using my chosen online MLM approach?”
Here’s where you have to be honest with yourself. It’s not a beauty pageant so admitting that you aren’t perfect is just fine. Take the time to really examine all the steps involved in your online marketing approach, and figure out where you fall flat on your face most of the time.
For example, when one of my downline first started writing articles for article marketing, she had massive writer’s block. Although her goal was to produce only one article per week, she was inhibited by her fear that she would somehow “get it wrong” or produce only cruddy articles that no one wanted to read. She had great ideas and excellent keywords, but she just couldn’t get started writing. In this example, the actual writing turned out to be her “sucky” spot.
Step #3: Design an Online MLM Workout Plan
This third step is about muscle-building, which will keep you from looking like a scrawny spent hen. Once you’ve figured where you keep failing in your online MLM marketing approach, design a little workout program for yourself so you can build a little muscle.
The goal of the workout is to get you doing actions that you are failing to do. An action repeated consistently over a number of days becomes a habit. A habit is easy to follow, thus saving you from falling flat on your face over and over.
So how do you design a workout plan? Well you take the action that you want to do but are failing to do (or don’t do well), and you practice that action, a lot, until it becomes easy.
An Example of a Workout Plan to Cure Writer’s Block
In the case of the gal with the writer’s block described above, the workout program we designed together for her was simple. Every morning before heading out to her day job, she would sit down and write her proposed article for the week.
Since she was always very organized, she usually had an outline for the article. As she wrote her article, her goal was to get it into the computer as quickly and smoothly as possible, following her outline. She had a maximum of 45 minutes to write her article each day.
It went like this. The first day of the week, she would write the article following her outline. The next day, she would open a completely new document and write the article again from scratch. Ditto with the third and fourth days. No editing was allowed on any of the drafts. Finally, on the fifth day she was allowed to pick the draft she liked best out of the bunch, and edit that single document. The edited documented was the one she submitted to article directories and forums.
Now this might seem like a whole lot of work for just one itty-bitty article, but remember that the goal of the workout program wasn’t just to produce an article. The goal was to bust through this gal’s writing block and help her access her writing skills. It’s kind of like the difference between handing someone a fish or teaching them to fish. Same thing.
Excellent Online MLM Results
Guess what? It worked great! The time limit meant she didn’t have to second-guess herself. She barely had time to type in the article, which meant she ended up writing like she talked. The fact that she could not edit the document after she was done meant she had to trust her writing ability and instincts. The fact that she wrote the same article from scratch four days in a row gave her the opportunity to take a fresh approach on the topic.
After about three months of faithfully following her workout program, she was able to write most articles with ease. She no longer had to write four drafts of each article. Except in occasional situations, she was able to write a solid marketing article in just one draft. If she encountered writer’s block about a particular topic, she would go back to the workout program and use it until she felt “unblocked.”
Just so you know, the workout program came from an intensive writing course I took during college, only instead of five drafts we had to write 11 drafts. It worked great back then, and it still works great now.
I hope this gives you some ideas on how you can develop some online MLM marketing muscles and avoid looking like a “spent hen.” After all, you wouldn’t want to be “culled” from the group, now would you? Just kidding!
That’s the best thing about MLM … you really can’t be culled. Your upline is there to serve you, whether you look like a scrawny chicken or not!
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/7326810@N08/ / CC BY 2.0
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