As a Network Marketer there is a constant need to find potential customers or “prospects” for our goods and services.
Traditionally, we were taught to initially focus on family and friends. These are referred to as “warm” leads. The goals was to get prospects to attend hotel meetings or listen to conference calls. Perhaps we made cold calls to strangers from a list we had bought from a lead generation company or even straight out of the phone book. With any of these methods there was a excellent chance we got small or no results for our efforts.
These methods were standard practice up through the end of the twentieth century. There was usually constant rejection that tested the resolve of even the best marketers and many of us just failed to make enough income to operate a business and support ourselves. The failure rate was often in the upper 90 percentile during the first few years in business.
Today we have better options of prospecting and finding fresh leads. We have a somewhat improved chance of growing our businesses online. These methods involve the effective use of the internet for prospecting and running profitable businesses.
Firstly, making and managing our own internet website has become essential for most businesses. The cost for making and managing, known as hosting, a basic website averages less than a dollar a day. Of course, this also means there is greater competition as there might be hundreds or even thousands of websites with the same or similar goods and services being offered. Therefore the real challenge now is to get targeted prospects to visit our particular website. Banner ads, co-registration links, pay per click (PPC) ads, search engine optimization (SEO) and traffic exchanges are methods to get visitors or “traffic” to our website and build our online businesses. These components of internet marketing warrant their own separate discussions.
Having an effective, “attractive” website should be the marketer’s first concern. This drives traffic to the website. A well crafted website can hold the attention of the targeted prospects long enough to shake out the casual browsers, internet “tire kickers” and looky loos.
The website must have a way to “capture” the prospect’s information like name, email address, phone number and other information. The marketer then has a way to immediately contact the prospect and/or place the prospect’s information into an “autoresponder” for follow up contacts. The autoresponder stores the prospect’s information and allows the marketer to automatically send the prospect a series of emails or newsletters. The emails or newsletters are sent out over a period days, weeks or months. These communications allows the prospects a chance to learn more about the marketer and their goods and services.
There are courses to teach marketers how to write affective communication geared to their offerings. Sometimes there are emails and newsletters provided as part of a hosting and autoresponder package. The emails and newsletters gives the marketer a chance to build creditability and establish a relationship with prospects.
Building trust and credibility is an vital step since a new prospect may be suspicious of the marketer, fearing a scam or just not yet ready to accept the offer. After building a rapport with the prospect, the marketer is in a more favorable position to place the offer in front of the prospect.
This whole process might take several days, weeks or even months and can lead to sales with new customers and clients. The skilled network marketer has a greater chance of growing a profitable business.
Tags: Attractive Website, Failure Rate, Internet Website, Network Marketer, Percentile, Website Banner