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.

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/anniemole/ / CC BY 2.0

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • LinkedIn

{ 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!

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/redvers/ / CC BY 2.0

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • LinkedIn

{ 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!

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/uair01/ / CC BY 2.0

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • LinkedIn

{ 10 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.

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/hiddedevries/ / CC BY 2.0

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • LinkedIn

{ 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!

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/cambodia4kidsorg/ / CC BY 2.0

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • LinkedIn

{ 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:
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • LinkedIn

{ 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?

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/fdecomite/ / CC BY 2.0

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • LinkedIn

{ 1 comment }

Online MLM: Do You Feel Like a Spent Hen?

by Stephanie Valentine on December 31, 2009

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

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • LinkedIn

{ 2 comments }

Online MLM: What Goes on Your About Page?

by Stephanie Valentine on December 24, 2009

Writing about yourself should be fairly simple because no one knows you better than you, but many people find writing about themselves very difficult.

The problem is that we know so much about ourselves that we don’t know what to write. And when it comes to our online MLM websites and blogs, should we write about our business, our personal lives, our kids, or what?

Good question.

What Goes on the “About You” Page?
One very smart man (Chris Brogan, of course), posted a blog a while back about what should go on a person’s About You page. He listed a bunch of ideas and also a bunch of questions to think about. He also suggested that all online marketers needed to re-evaluate their About page, and probably rewrite it.

So I did. I actually wiped the slate clean on the old version and started from scratch. Based on Chris’ advice, I wrote about:

- who I am in the online MLM world (pioneer)
- the state of the online MLM world (needs improvement)
- my mission (to improve the quality and quantity of online MLM)
- a little bit about my life in the boonies (earning a steady check despite living in a town with more cows and horses than people)
- what I’m looking for (a few good people who are pioneers, too)

Read my About page here.

The most important part of what I wrote on my About page is the last part: what I’m looking for.

Chris Brogan says this is the most crucial piece that people leave off their About page. You can tell people all kinds of stuff about you and MLM and your business, but if you never tell prospects what you actually want, they won’t know.

Want more business builders? Put that on your About page. Want more people to get healthy eating your product? Add to your About page. Want to save the world with your company’s philanthropic program? Post it to that About page. Whatever you want, don’t be afraid to put it up there. That way, love it or hate it, at least people will know what you are all about.

And don’t forget to include a call to action. Once you’ve stated what you want, tell people what they should do if they want to respond to your proposition. Should they email you? Download something? Call you? Follow you on Twitter? Whatever it is, spell it out clearly.

Does that give you some good ideas on how and why you might want to restructure your About page? Hope so. Now go for it!

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.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • LinkedIn

{ 2 comments }

Online MLM: A Little Grunge Never Hurts

by Stephanie Valentine on December 22, 2009

The MLM industry has been striving for a professional image for decades now, and for the most part achieving it. That’s a good thing, a really good thing, because nothing sucks more than prospecting someone only to get slammed for working in a “shady” industry.

I mean really, if you’ve been doing MLM for any length of time, you finally reach a point where you can’t stand to hear words like “scam,” “ponzi scheme,” or “shady deal” one more time. Am I right? Ok, so professionalism is a really good thing in MLM.

On the personal level, presenting yourself in a professional way is also useful. It gives people the impression that you are serious about your business, as well as knowledgeable. It inspires confidence. But, there are times when being totally professional all the time can actually hurt your MLM business.

Online MLM: Why You Shouldn’t be Totally Pro All the Time

If you want to market your MLM business online, then there are some cases where you shouldn’t be all pro all the time. There is a time and place for a little “grunge factor” in the online world, especially for MLMers.

Now why wouldn’t you want to present a totally professional image 24/7 online? That’s because contact on the internet, in contrast to contact on the phone or in person, is already somewhat impersonal. With most MLM websites, people can’t hear you, shake your hand, or easily get to know you.

Sure, you can put up pictures of yourself, post an audio of you discussing the MLM business, or even put up a video of yourself, but most of these don’t come across as part of a prospect’s first impression of your online MLM presence. At least not the audio or video pieces, since these require the prospect to click a few buttons.

So if a prospect wanders to your online MLM website, and all she sees is a bunch of slick graphics and some words, chances are she’ll leave, quickly. That’s where the grunge factor comes in. If you can throw up some interesting headlines on your website that will catch a prospect’s attention as well as show her that you have a sense of humor, then that’s good.

Online Photos and the Grunge Factor
If you post pictures, post a mix of professional and personal shots of yourself. The professional shot shows that you are serious about your business. The personal shots, especially if they show you doing something you love, give the prospect some visual clues about who you really are. For instance, say you post a picture of you taken right after a soccer game played in the mud. Your hair is messed up, you are sweaty, and you have streaks of mud on your smiling face. You are wearing a jersey and carrying a soccer ball. That’s a perfect “grunge” picture that conveys a lot about you to a prospect, in an instant. It shows that you:

- are not afraid to get your hands (and the rest of you) dirty
- don’t mind the rest of the world seeing you a little messed up
- play soccer and like sports
- are physically healthy (this is important if your product is health related)
- like to have fun
- probably like to win, which implies a drive to be successful

… and so forth. So as you think about what pictures to post on your website or blog, don’t forget that a little grunge can go a long way in the online world. In the example above, with the soccer picture, not only will the picture show a little grunge, but it may even help you put your website in a niche market: soccer lovers. See what I mean?

Words Can Be Grungy, Too
So a few personalized pictures scattered throughout your online MLM presence is a great thing. The other place you can add a little grunge factor is in the way you write. If you write pretty much the way you talk, then you’ll have achieved a little grunge in your writing.

When many online MLM newbies first start writing their blog posts and articles, they churn out pieces filled with stiff language and uncomfortable phrasing. The articles are difficult to read and even harder to digest. Ick.

Instead, write with a little less formality while still conveying useful information, facts, figures, and logic. Go to Alltop and look up some of the top blogs in your topic area. Read their posts. Find a style you like. Adapt it to your own personality. Then start to write. You’ll probably achieve a nice balance between information exchange, humor, interest, and personality.

As with everything, online MLM is about striking a balance in tone. You want to demonstrate that you have expertise in your business and products, but you also want to come across as a real person. A real person has likes, dislikes, pet peeves, hobbies, warts, kids, good and bad days, and more. Get it? Be professional but remain yourself. This approach also helps you keep your business fun and interesting, rather than “nose to the grindstone” boring. Your MLM business should never be boring … if it is, change it up or QUIT!

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/alaina_marie/ / CC BY 2.0

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • LinkedIn

{ 1 comment }