Claire Morawski

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Whether you are involved in a Network Marketing Company (MLM) or you are a service professional or you are a small business owner, internet marketing can help you explode your business. However, one has to have a strategy in place for the marketing to be effective.

Branding YOU as the Expert

The NUMBER ONE rule of thumb is that you have to Brand You and Your Company as a leading thought in your industry, to succeed on the internet. You have to respect the ‘law’ that first you help people before asking for their business. It is human nature that when people start viewing you as an expert in your field, they automatically do what you tell them to do – as they have come to respect your opinion and trust you that you are advising them for their own benefit. You have become a source of authority in their life – so they buy from you, they ‘hire’ you as their service professional, they follow your guidance, …

To become known as an expert in your niche, you mainly start by helping people. You have to earn their trust, by showing them that you are a leader in your industry and you know what you are talking about. But first they have to experience first hand that you know what you are talking about and that they can trust you. Hence, a complete no-no is pitching your sales talk at first sight. Rather at the first meeting offer some tips on how they can better their situation.

Let me give you an example for all this to be clear. Let’s say you are a florist by profession and have a store (can be online or offline). You are in an online forum when someone complains that they bought these flowers and after just 1 day they died. So you would write in the forum about tips how to make your flowers survive longer than 1 day – you would go into how to choose flowers when buying, if to cut the stem or not, how often to change the water, what room temperature should the flowers be and so on. At the end of your comment, you would write your name and your website address. This would position you as an expert, and people would come to visit your website and then your store. Compare the above to instead leaving a comment and writing something like this: ‘Buy your flowers from www.FxLxOxWxExRxS.com – guaranteed to last you for 10 days.’ I am sure you realize which comment will generate more traffic.

Who can Market Online?

Anyone who is alive and breathing can use the power of the internet to market and brand oneself and one’s company.

If you are a Service Professional or a Solo Entrepreneur, you can use the internet to brand yourself as an expert in your field. Set up a blog and market yourself as a thought leader in your niche, by writing articles and giving free knowledge to your readers. For example if you are an accountant you can write articles on how to calculate your yearly income tax, how to save on your taxes, simple tips for business owners, and so on.

Same goes if you are a Small Business Owner – use the internet to brand your business as the leading company in your niche. If you are an owner of a hairdressing salon – write articles on how to have a hair cut that suits your features, the latest trends, 5 easy tips on how to ensure healthy hair, and more.

Let’s now look at someone who is involved in an MLM company. You were given a generic company website, you were not taught how to market effectively, and hence you are suffering from a lack of leads. So you turn to the internet to brand yourself as an expert in your niche, and hence start generating endless leads. Let us say that you are involved in a company selling vitamins. So you create a blog where you market yourself as an expert in vitamins – you write articles on why vitamins are important, how many vitamins a day is needed, what vitamins to avoid if you are breast feeding, and on and on. This will brand you as an expert in vitamins, and people would automatically follow your advice and buy vitamins from you. Now in Network Marketing, one makes a living from selling but also from recruiting. So it is also important to brand yourself as an expert in recruiting. You can do this by targeting those individuals who are aspiring entrepreneurs. (Note: not your friends and family, nor the strangers at the mall, nor the leads that you call off a list, but aspiring entrepreneurs who have always dreamt of being their own boss). You would write articles to teach them on how to start their own business, how to market online, how you recruit people, and so on.

One thing I have to emphasize is that the information that you supply to people has to be the truth – as otherwise if someone finds out that you have been tricking them, then your reputation and business takes a quick downhill turn.

How to Market Online

Your next question must be how do I market online and brand myself as an expert?! You have to use marketing strategies to generate traffic to your website – some of them are free and others are paid strategies. An easy-to-understand example, which many of you are familiar with, is offline marketing – stores and other businesses use different mediums, such as newspapers, magazines, press releases, postcards, radio, TV to advertise and generate traffic to their store or business. Exactly the same goes on in the internet. There are different marketing strategies that you can make use of to advertise you and your business, to generate traffic to your online store (your website) and / or your offline business.

One of my favourite marketing strategy is blogging, and hence article marketing. I am sure that you have realized that having an online presence is a must nowadays for any business. If you don’t have an online presence, you are invisible to the world, and generating business would be harder. Some businesses choose to have a static website, however I strongly prefer a self-hosted blog where you are constantly updating information and constantly communicating with your clients. (Note: creating a self-hosted blog is easy to setup – no knowledge of HTML needed, and you can set up your own self-hosted blog with one 90 minute training webinar. You can Click Here for the free training) With blogging comes article writing, where you can even submit your articles to different directories – this marketing strategy will help to continue branding yourself as the person-to-go-to in your niche, and will help to promote your blog as a platform to your business.

Other marketing strategies include using social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn to brand you as an expert, and direct people to your blog, and hence to your business (can be online store or offline business). Using paid strategies such as Pay Per Click ads and Paid Press Releases is another form of generating traffic to your business. Leaving comments on other blogs, participating in forums and interacting on the internet is also effective, especially in the beginning. Advertising for free on Craigslist and Backpage is another option. E-mail marketing is another effective way to keep a correspondence with your list of readers and clients.

As you can see, there are many ways one can ‘advertise’ on the internet. But MY ADVICE TO YOU is to choose one marketing strategy, or maximum two, and stick with it till you start seeing results. Keep tweaking and testing till you become an expert in that marketing strategy, and your conversions start pouring in. Always follow the mantra ‘expect to give before expecting anything in return’ – give out free valuable information (not spam and not pitching your sales story) that will brand you as a leader in your niche, and eventually this will earn you big bucks. And also keep in mind that using the internet as a medium to brand yourself as an expert takes time – so be patient but consistent – your determination will eventually pay off big time.

I personally use MLSP as my marketing system – it is my educational platform where I constantly learn effective marketing strategies that brand me as an expert in my niche, strengthens my reputation, and consequently gives me great leverage and power to explode my business. If you would like to test drive the same system, then visit www.BrandingYouandCo.com for more information.

To Your Success

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If you are involved in an MLM company (also known as network marketing companies) or are interested in joining one, then you must be familiar with the phrase… ‘make a list of friends and family’. If you are anything like me, you must be really frustrated with this phrase, as you are aware that most often than not this strategy simply doesn’t work.

Another frustrating phrase is …‘talk to as many people as you can’. This in other words means pitching your sales-story to strangers, assuming that all their life they were waiting for this moment, and they will jump in the boat too and will make you rich! However, an interesting analogy is, that if you become an accountant you don’t ‘pester’ others to become an accountant too and work for your firm?!

After trying a couple of these strategies, one becomes to realize how frustrating this is and most often than not will lead you nowhere or with just a couple of dollars, which is not much compared to the hard work you put in, or worse off spending more than you are earning.

Why do most people fail?

A lot of people are shown a different view of the business model. A lot of people are told that there is no selling involved, and that the products are so good that they sell for themselves. ‘Once people try, they will buy for themselves and their family…’, the pitch goes. This myth is misleading, and brings a false relief to people who don’t like selling. However, people, with no experience of sales and no proper training in marketing and business, struggle desperately, often quitting within a few months. Some people might even join another MLM company, thinking that the problem is the company – but they are wrong.

THE MAIN PROBLEM is that most often than not, people are not taught how to market properly. What you want is people being ‘attracted’ to you and calling you to join your business. And this is done through learning how to market correctly, and through learning how to brand you as the expert. If you haven’t read Mike Dillard’s Magnetic Sponsoring, then grab a copy now, as it will change your outlook in how business is done.

In addition, people are given false beliefs that by joining an MLM one is going to become rich instantly. You can make money in network marketing, but it takes determination, hard work and patience, plus the PROPER TRAINING. Unfortunately, most of the training of most MLM companies is ‘outdated, offline-only, old-school techniques’, which although might work for a few, there are other cutting-edge marketing strategies (based on science) that can actually guarantee you results if implemented persistently.

Another frustrating problem within an MLM company is the attrition rate. The ratio at which people join your team and the amount of people who quit is horrendous. You find yourself training someone to leave you for another company. This can easily be resolved by giving your team proper ‘modern’ marketing strategies which actually work. Once they see that it’s working, they view you as an expert, and would want to continue being in your team.

So How do People Earn The Big Money in Network Marketing?

From research of different MLM’s brochures and website, in the success stories page, one always finds in small print that the typical annual gross income is much much less than otherwise advertised. A lot of articles state that 97% fail in the network marketing industry with only less than 3% actually live the life that is often the bait to many to enter the network marketing industry. While I won’t go into the exact percentage, it’s a fact that only a few succeed to earn a substantial income from their MLM business. MLM is often compared to a pyramid scheme where the bottom people ‘slave’, so that the few at the top become richer and richer at their expense.

However, it is important to note that those who have made it to the top, have done so through a lot of hard work, maybe luck too. For sure they didn’t do it just through talking to family and friends. A probable answer is that they might have already had a large network of people, which made their list of family and friends much longer than yours. It could also be that they previously came from a sales background. An interesting fact is that if someone sticks to the same company for 10 years, they are in the running of becoming part of the top few – but could this also mean that they were persistent, worked hard towards their goal, had a vision and did not give up easily?

Is There A Future For Me in Network Marketing?

Nowadays, there are different strategies of how to go about your MLM business, and achieve success – dare I say it… guaranteed success. But this is done through proper training, and being determined to put in hard work. The get-rich-quick-and-easy mentality does not work. My favourite strategies that I personally use are:

1. an attraction-marketing based system that teaches me how to market successfully to the target people that I want and who are interested in what I have to say. I don’t waste my time giving meetings to people who are not interested, and only end up buying because they pity me. You can check out the system here.

2. the second strategy is providing free valuable information first, and building a relationship with my readers, while branding myself as an expert and positioning myself as the-person-to-go-to in my industry. And this I do through my own self-hosted blog. Subscribe to Claire Morawski’s free training on how to create a successful blog.

To Your Success

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