Category Archives: Careers

I’m so confused!

Posted on July 9, 2009 | 1 Comment

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That was the subject line of an email I recently got from a colleague. She & I are in the same network marketing company and she’s been struggling to build her business.

If you’re in one, you know the drill. Start a names list & harass everyone you’ve ever met since birth, purchase opportunity leads and spend HOURS on the phone trying to call people who are magically never home to take your call, go to the mall and put fliers on cars, and/or strike up conversations with strangers in the hopes that you’ll find someone who’s looking for what you’re offering.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard there’s a better way. Mike Dillard and Anne Sieg turned the network marketing industry on its ears a few years ago with the Magnetic Sponsoring and Renegade systems. Well, my colleague had also heard of them, and had studied all the “free” materials she could by and on both of them and their systems. (I know, I know… I know what you’re thinking! But I’ll address the unrealistic expectations from what you can get “for free” on a later post.)

What was so confusing?

She wrote, “It seems to me that if you join their program—you are selling their material–not your business. I would really like to chat with someone who has actually used this stuff and see what they say–is it all hype?”

First let’s address the hype.

While the MLM industry is rife with it, what good does it do? It only hurts in the long run. It either backfires immediately because everyone can see through it, or it backfires later when people ask for refunds because they realize that what you’ve said isn’t true.

Secondly, there are way too many people who are having success building their own businesses with these products and systems for this to be just about making money for Mike & Ann.

The Magnetic Sponsoring & Renegade systems are:

  1. training systems for you & your new enrollees
  2. to learn internet marketing,
  3. to learn how to market YOUR business online,
  4. to generate your own high quality prospects,
  5. and to provide a means to monetize (meaning to make money from) your prospects whether or not they ever join you in your network marketing business (by being an affiliate for Dillard & Sieg).

According to the law of averages when working with purchased opportunity leads (some people do better and some people do worse, this is the “Average”), you will need to dial 200 numbers just to get one enrollment!

YUCK!!!

Why not find a way to have your lead generation system pay for itself on the front end while generating leads for your business on the back end? Sure beats that “200 to 1″ ratio!

Success in network marketing really depends on each person finding out which method works best for them, and working THAT method primarily. That’s why I started looking into other methodologies.

Sure some people are very successful with warm market strategies, opportunity leads, or the “walk & talk” method. But most aren’t. Besides, why ignore the entire online world and the great resource that it is?

What I got out of the Mike Dillard & Anne Sieg materials:

  • How to apply the geeky side of internet marketing to my network marketing business. It works great! It just takes a while to start getting the financial results when you start it from scratch. What it really is, though, is generating your own opportunity leads. So you’re still working leads, it’s just a more powerful method because when you call the prospects, you’re saying, “Hi, you visitied my xyz.com website and requested more information…”
  • Another big thing I’ve gotten out of the Dillard & Sieg methods is the self-growth. It’s embarrassing how backwards and poverty-minded my thinking has been over the past few years.

Ok, all that said, it is my opinion, and I’m hearing this more from the gurus now, that the whole “marketing your MLM via internet marketing” niche is becoming more & more saturated and more and more competitive. It requires SOOO much content creation, and what hasn’t already been said by everyone else yet? How do you market yourself as a leader that others want to work with in the face of all that competition for attention?

You create your own system, that’s how!

But who has the time and resources to do that? More importantly, who has the WILL to do that? Why reinvent the tools that already exist?

That’s one of the reasons there’s such a huge movement away from the “geeky online marketing” methodology toward social networking.

Not only is social networking SOOOOO much simpler to do, it’s much simpler to teach!!! For a vast majority of the population, we’re already on the social networks. We’re having fun, but wasting a lot of time. What if we could network socially, but with purpose? (I guess you could say that it’s “old school walk & talk” applied to the internet.) Most of us have no problem striking up conversation and socializing online. Speaking for myself, since 1996 I’ve made more friends online than I have off line!!! lol

The best part is that we don’t have to teach the methodology ourselves!!! You don’t have to be an expert at this. Just direct yourself and your serious biz builders to the training source. Max Steingart has been teaching what is now called “attraction marketing” via social networks for about 12 years already. His classes are extremely affordable. And once you learn the method, it’s applicable to ALL social networks.

Oh, another word about all this training that’s available. Pick a skill or system, learn it and MASTER it before moving on to another!!!!! Take if from an ex-teacher: you learn by doing. So…

Train then DO!

Let me add a few more exclamation points to that…

!!!!!!!!!!!

I cannot stress this enough. Jumping around from method to method accomplishes nothing. You get confused with all the trainings, then you start confusing “training” with “working,” and never build your business.

You MUST pick the method that’s most appealing to YOU. If you’re more of a geek, then go the online marketing route. But if you’re more social than geeky, then go the social networking route. Which ever you choose, though: Learn it. Master it. Start earning from it. Then you can add other skills to diversify and increase your earnings. But at that point, you still focus on the method that already works for you – don’t stop working it. You’re just adding another skill on top of it.

So, I’ve been studying and using the Max Steingart method and LOVE it! I’m just socializing on the internet, getting to know people, making new friends, reconnecting with old friends. By asking the right questions at the right time and paying attention to what people say and how they say it, I can determine if someone is a prospect (qualify them) before I EVER bring up business! So, there’s no rejection, and once I’ve qualified them and know what it is that they want to accomplish, helping them accomplish that is a breeze!!!

Training use to be a hassle. Now it’s just fun – because we’re just playing around on the internet!!!

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Review of Mike Dillard’s Products & System

Posted on May 6, 2009 | Leave a comment

In some of my previous posts I’ve shared with you that I had been struggling in Network Marketing (NWM) for years. It took God’s backing me into a corner and hitting me over the head with a 2×4 for me to finally take the plunge again with my current company. With it, I finally have the training and support that I really needed to find the success that was eluding me.

That’s the short story.

That success was limited, though, so I plugged into some independent training sources and saw GREAT improvements in my results. The two best things I learned from them was:

  • Your pay check follows your personal growth.
  • Posture: people don’t join businesses, products, comp plans, or whatever. They join YOU. So you have to sell you and your ability to help them succeed.

But I still hadn’t found what I was looking for. Because I’d designed and promoted websites in the past, I knew there had to be a better way! There had to be a system that used real online marketing and promotion for building a NWM business. Instead of trying to create that system myself, I started looking around for an existing one… and stumbled on several. (Thank God, because I REALLY didn’t want to do all that work to create it! LOL)

I’ve always been the type to help people avoid frustration and heartache if I could. In my current endeavors, that translates into helping people avoid scams, save their money and their dignity. So whether or not you work with me in my current business is irrelevant. This is just a means of helping you find the right business for you, and be successful once you do.

That in mind, the source I want to share with you now was created by another home business failure, Mike Dillard.

Now, I’ve read many so-called-reviews of Mike’s system and products online, and I can tell you just by reading them that the writers don’t know what they’re talking about. They’ve never actually gotten their hands on these materials and studied them! In my review below, I’ll give you enough information to know the difference between these products, general information about what’s contained in them (without giving away the bank), and what each product is intended to do for you.

Let me give my honest opinion of him straight up. Mike desperately needs an editor because his writing skills are very lacking – but not desperately so. His sentence and paragraph composition are barely acceptable, and he has serious problems with grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Every once in a while, I did find myself having to stop & “translate” what he wrote into something that made sense – just enough to get the concept of what he meant. That aside, with these products, he shares some very valuable skills that he worked HARD to learn for himself. If you choose to take advantage of his knowledge, it’s well worth your time and money.

As I said earlier, Mike was a NWM failure. If you’ve ever tried one, you’ll recognize the problems he (and I) had: make a list of all your friends & family so you can start hounding them to the point that they start avoiding you, then start trying to get them to refer their friends & family to you, then start buying deadbeat online leads and hounding them. He didn’t like doing any of that. He’s an admitted telephone chicken! So he started studying with professional, successful marketers about how it’s really done. From that he developed a few different products for different purposes.

Mike’s first product is called “Magnetic Sponsoring.” This is written for those in NWM. It takes him an entire book to tell you that if you’re struggling, it’s not your fault, you’ve just been told to sell everything except the one thing that matters: YOU. When people join someone in a business venture, the thing that matters most is the person who told them about it: YOU. It’s not the company or the products or the comp plan that matters. It’s YOU. So you should be working on yourself and selling You, Inc. Maybe it just seemed basic to me, but not to you. So, if you’re in a NWM biz already or just considering one, you might want to get this book to decrease your learning curve on this concept alone. This book is $39 dollars and you earn a $20 commission.

Another product Mike has for those in NWM is “Black Belt Recruiting. ” This is a 6 CD set that demonstrates how to recruit in a professional manner. The trainers in the videos: Mike Dillard and Mark Wieser, one of the industry’s top recruiters. If you’re struggling with this, you really need this one. Just hearing how the pros approach in a manner that doesn’t provoke objections and overcome those that do come up is awesome. You’ll have quite a few “ah ha” moments! This CD set costs $147 and you earn a 40% commission ($58.80).

Now here come a couple of products for those who may not be in the NWM industry.

Mike’s “Building On a Budget” (BOAB) will be a harder read for those of you who are grammar snobs like me. But if you can get through it, you’ll learn some marketing techniques that will help you no matter what type of business you’re considering (or may already be doing). These are real sources to use, how to set them up, and tips and tricks to use them for better online marketing results. This book costs $39 and you earn a 40% commission ($15.60).

Last is a more thorough course for online marketing, “MLM Traffic Formula.” Yes, it’s geared toward MLM/NWM, but it applies to any marketing efforts, no matter what kind of business is being marketed. It contains step-by-step methods to create your online marketing tools to generate more traffic to your website, no matter what the subject is. This is not the marketing resources that you learn in BOAB, but how to create your websites, lead capture pages, blogs, and such (the tools) for which you’re generating the traffic that results in sales. This book costs $997 and you earn a 40% commission ($398.80).

Bottom line is that if you can get past Mike’s poor grammar and poor writing skills, his system not only provides a way to make money on the Internet, it also teaches you how to do just that. The best benefit of MS is that you can make handsome profits marketing just these products. Of course, it’s only one-time sales and not residual as with NWM…

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