Growing your network marketing business is your ultimate objective. Nobody really wants to build a business that peaks and stops growing, right?

Actually, there is a classic rule in business. Your business will never stay the same. It will either be growing, or declining. This isn’t just about network marketing and MLM, it applies to any type of business.

Growth requires change. Growth in business requires adapting to change. When the time comes for change and growth, many people rebel against it. It’s natural to desire a status quo, to find a comfort zone and stay in it.

Many people in network marketing find change difficult to deal with. I’m talking about the kind of change that takes you from one level to the next. For example, bearing down and learning how to effectively present your opportunity to more prospects. Rather than realizing that change and growth is an internal thing that might be temporarily uncomfortable but necessary for success, some networkers tend to look to things outside themselves for answers.

Sometime they want somebody upline or downline to make their business grow somehow. Sometime they begin to believe that the compensation plan is what’s holding them back. Maybe the products aren’t just right. Some begin to believe that external factors beyond their direct control (such as the economy) are the reason their success isn’t what it should be.

When you start thinking like this, it’s easy to  feel that a different opportunity, a more lucrative pay plan, or a better upline training and support system is the thing. This is why some people seem to jump around from one network marketing business to another, never achieving near their potential with any one of them, but always seeking.

Two keys to your growth and success in network marketing:

• understand that growth requires change and adapting to change

• understand that change and growth means stepping outside your comfort zone

Once you step outside that comfort zone, and do what you need to do, you actually get better and establish a new comfort zone! Always focus on what really drives your success – you.

It all works out. Just focus, adapt, grow, make it happen!

To be successful in network marketing and build your dream business, you must be a leader.

Some people seem to be natural born leaders, in the sense that they’ve been “take charge” type people all their life. Maybe you’re not terribly outgoing, and have wondered if you have what it takes to be an effective leader.

The good news is that leadership is something that can be developed. You have already demonstrated some true leadership capability simply by having the desire and taking the initiative to start your own home business!

You can start from wherever you are and build your leadership skills as you go along.

There are a couple of things that strongly influence your ability to develop as a leader.

• your ability to get along with other people – having patience and faith in others

• how much you believe in and commit to win-win relationships

As you develop as an effective leader, you’ll find that you attract other leaders. The greater and higher you build your own personal leadership skills, the higher the level of leaders you’ll attract to your network marketing business.

Here are seven characteristics of great leaders. Reflect on these and plan where you can begin developing your own leadership skills to a higher level. Always keep in mind – the greater your leadership skills, the more leaders you’ll attract to your business. As you can imagine, this becomes a very powerful factor in your success.

1) Leaders quietly work through obstacles and difficulties – you rarely if ever hear them complain or whine about anything. Their attitude is Just Do It.

2) Leaders never look back – they focus on the future and what can be, not on the past and what might have been.

3) Leaders know how to help people get started “where they are” by showing them opportunity in virtually any situation or circumstance.

4) Leaders understand that giving their team quality time and strengthening them with training and encouragement makes all the difference in the world.

5) Leaders aren’t envious or jealous of others with great potential – they look forward to learning and working with the very best they can find.

6) Leaders assume responsibility. They don’t point fingers or make excuses. The buck stops with them.

7) Leaders understand that education and ongoing self-development is critical to their long term success. They enjoy life and the rewards they’ve earned, but they never “arrive” and reach a point where they think they know all there is to know.

Build yourself as a leader – your network marketing business will prosper!

Many people start a network marketing business, and plan to do their prospecting and business building online.

Building a powerful network marketing business online is very realistic, particularly if you learn how to use the social media and networking sites like Facebook effectively. It’s all about going where your potential prospects are going and learning how to get involved and meet them.

That said, I have found that some network marketers prefer to start their businesses exclusively online, while avoiding warm market contact as much as possible. Sometime, this is because they have approached their best contacts one or more times in the past, and feel reluctant to go back and say “I have done my research and found the RIGHT opportunity this time!” Other times, they feel that many of their friends will reject them for one reason or another.

I believe in and teach attraction marketing. This is the art of having prospects who are currently seeking an opportunity come to you looking for information. It is often easier to work with people who are interested and approach you asking for details, as opposed to exploring possibilities with warm market friends who may or may not have any interest at all. It really depends on how you approach it.

If you have done your research and made a serious commitment to building a network marketing business, you should let your friends and family know what you’re up to. I’m not a big fan of making a list of 100 names and systematically working down the list making phone calls and trying to schedule presentations. The approach I prefer is using “warm marketing notification”, then making those calls.

Put together something that explains your business in a nutshell, including a little about why you chose your business. Send your warm market contacts a personal note, a card, a letter, or even an email with links to your online business site. Invite them to take a look, and explain that you’ll be in touch in a few days to see what they think.

Notifying your warm market in this way, then following up after they’ve had time to receive your information, helps take the pressure off everyone. You aren’t putting them on the spot by calling and trying to schedule a presentation right then, and you’re giving them a chance to see just enough of your opportunity to determine whether they’re interested.

Those who are interested in making money with a home business will respond, while others might be prospects at a future time.

Do whatever you feel comfortable with. The big thing is, make those warm market contacts in the beginning. It gives you a chance to practice talking about your opportunity and helps you work out answers to common questions about your network marketing business. This will help you immensely when you are talking to prospects you find online.

If you’re using a Flip camcorder to create video for your blog or website, I’d like to share a tip with you.

The Flip is a great little camera. I love the fact that I can carry it around in my pocket, and take quick videos just about anywhere.

One of the difficulties I’ve encountered is trying to frame the shot just right when making a “talking head” video – a video of myself. Lots of us in network marketing, and other home businesses, do these to help with personal branding and promotion.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve framed a shot, did a short take, then had to re-frame the shot a few times to get it just right.

Here is a way I found to make this a whole lot easier.

How much time do you spend trying to manage and organize  your network marketing and MLM leads?

I used to spend a lot of time trying to keep up with them. I would take each incoming lead and put them into a contact manager program like ACT! or Oprius (even those that were set up to get automated followups through Aweber or a similar service).

I would schedule occasional followups to my leads, in addition to any that were sent out automatically. I thought I was being diligent and thorough, and I was. Problem is, was it worth it?

I was spending…

• lots of time entering leads into a database

• lots of time making sure all had contact information that looked valid

• lots of time splitting them off into groups based on “no phone number” and the like

• lots of time thinking of ways to squeeze out a few more responses…and so on

Bottom line, I felt that by micro-managing my leads I would sponsor a few more along the way and attain greater income and prosperity. Problem is, I discovered that all that time and detailed diligence could have been more productive elsewhere.

We live in a world where people looking for home income opportunities are inundated with information. When they are exposed to our opportunity, one of two things will happen. They will take an immediate interest and proceed to request more details, or they will move on to the next presentation they find. The key is to get them in our loop so that when the timing is right, they know who to contact.

So, don’t sweat micro-managing leads. Don’t dwell or focus on those who don’t step forward. Here is what I believe is the best thing to do.

Step 1: Have a “sales funnel” that captures their contact information and provides automated followup – the best network marketing upline teams have these systems in place.

Step 2: Follow up with prospects that come through the funnel and express interest in learning more. Some will join you, some won’t. The ones that don’t, let your system continue to followup with them and move on.

Step 3: Continue working on generating more leads. Be active in the social networks. Get leads into the funnel.

When working with leads, your main energy should be focused on bringing prospects looking for opportunity into your funnel and working closely with those who step forward wanting more.

Much better to spend an hour working on getting new leads than worrying about how to get more response from older ones.

There are many things to consider when choosing a good network marketing / MLM opportunity. You want a home business opportunity that fits YOU and provides you with a realistic shot at making some decent money.

The first thing is to put strong consideration into the actual opportunity. Once you’ve found a solid network marketing opportunity backed by a reputable company, you can begin searching for a sponsor and upline support group that you feel comfortable and excited to work with.

But first things first…

Here are a few general guidelines to keep in mind when choosing your opportunity.

Age of Company + Hype Factor

Be wary of a new company that is heavily hyped and “over the top” with buzzwords like ground floor, pre-launch, get in at the top, and so on. You can sense this immediately.

New network marketing and MLM companies come and go every year. Think of your business as a long-term venture. You want stable income that will last. Go with a company that’s been around a while and has an established track record.

The Products

The products or services your company sells goes a LONG way in determining how successful you’ll be.

Super lucrative compensation plan + marginal products = potential burst of cash at the beginning with little prospect for stable ongoing income.

Be careful when considering network marketing opportunities built around a single product.  Be especially wary of juices and nutritional drinks – they are cloning and copying each other right and left and some of them are severely overpriced and have little value.

Try the products and ask yourself honestly, “would I buy these products if I wasn’t trying to make money from them”? The pricing of the products doesn’t have to be tightly competitive with Walmart pricing for similar products, IF they are better quality and offer enough value to justify a higher cost.

Opportunity to Make Money Outside Recruiting

It’s easy to step on toes with this one. However, it needs to be said. A good network marketing or MLM opportunity needs to have products with sufficient demand and value that people outside the opportunity will want to buy them. This does not mean you have to devote a big part of your time to retailing.

You can focus on sponsoring and team building, as you should, because…

a good network marketing product will attract traditional customers just by virtue of being good…and you’ll get customers as a benefit of making presentations, as some will desire to try the product but won’t be interested in the network marketing business aspect.

If you’ve wondered how Google determines the “page rank” for your home business website or blog, and what this really means, take some time to view this presentation by Matt Cutts. Matt is a well-known and highly followed member of Google’s team.

This video also gives huge insight into factors that Google considers when evaluating your website or blog. In other words, How to Do Better in Google!  It’s well worth your time if you want to understand more about what it takes to rank high in search results!
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If you have a blog or website to promote your home business, you’ve probably seen solicitations coming from “SEO firms” and “SEO consultants” that claim to specialize in getting your blog or website to the top of search engine results pages (SERPS) for your chosen keywords.

Search engine optimization is a huge business. Because of the great demand from home business owners looking for an effective way to get traffic to their sites, there are a lot of people with some very basic SEO (search engine optimization) training setting up shop and promoting themselves as “experts” in this area.

Here is a solicitation that came through my contact form recently. This was obviously not prepared by professional copywriters, but the message is typical.

We are a leading SEO company providing the best search engine optimization services. We act as your business partner and helps you reach your business goals. We promote websites no matter who you are – a huge company with thousands of employees, a small business or a professional who offers professional /consulting services. Let us know if you are interested and we will get back to you with more details.

You have to watch out when dealing with any person or firm that claims expertise in search engine optimization. Many people armed with a little knowledge go into this business with tools and methods that are less effective than they used to be, and outright dangerous to your search engine rankings if used improperly.

These methods can include:

• building backlinks to your site from private blog networks and link farms

• submitting to web directories

• creating social media properties with content linking back to your site

While all these techniques have a place in the big SEO picture, inexperienced SEO consultants often use them excessively and create potential problems for you in the long term. Just about anyone can use automated software to build backlinks and mass submit to directories. Often, this activity can lead to a temporary boost in search engine ranking for low-competition keywords, but the effect is usually short term and doesn’t last long.

True search engine optimization requires an approach that takes many factors into account – your market, what your potential visitors are searching for when they want to find products or opportunities like your offer, and much more. There is much more to professional SEO than just creating easy automated backlinks and submitting content indiscriminately all over the place.

Be careful. Your blog or website is your “home base” and brand on the Internet, and should be promoted professionally.

Message body:
We are a leading India based SEO company providing the best search engine
optimization services. We act as your business partner and helps you reach your
business goals. We promote websites no matter who you are - a huge company with
thousands of employees, a small business or a professional who offers professional /
consulting services. Let us know if you are interested and we will get back to you
with more details.

Article marketing is a very effective way to promote yourself and your home business, but many marketers are falling into common traps that waste much of the effort they put into this.

The good news is, you can avoid these traps and set yourself far above the crowd!

Home business builders promoting affiliate products, network marketing opportunities, and other products or services have been using “article marketing” for years.

Article marketing is still a great option for online promotion, for a number of reasons.

• it works well if done right

• it doesn’t require a significant investment of money unless you hire someone to do it for you

• it can help establish you as an “expert” or authority in your home business niche

Given the exposure and publicity that article marketing can provide, some home business builders try to cut corners and mass produce their content in an effort to get results more quickly.

Here are three common mistakes that many business owners make when they start publishing articles. If your business involves creating your personal brand and establishing a solid reputation online, pay particular attention to these points.

Writing Articles for Search Engines Only

How many times have you seen articles that are basically incoherent and somewhat repetitive? Chances are, the person who wrote that article was writing for the search engines, not human readers. Some “experts” teach that the style and readability of an article isn’t that important – that the emphasis should be on constructing the article with keywords and related terms in a certain way to achieve better search engine rankings.

Using keywords and creating your articles with SEO (search engine optimization) in mind is quite acceptable. However, it is important to create respectable content that will appeal to human readers looking for the information you’re writing about. If you write and publish weird sounding articles just for search engine consumption, you might achieve some ranking boost – but in the overall long-term  picture, you’ll lose out.

Poor Article Spinning Practices

Spinning article content is very popular. There are quite a few tools and software applications to make this job as easy as possible.

Basically, article spinning means taking an article you write and substituting synonyms and alternate phrases that will be “spun” by the software to create variations of your article. Basic article spinning syntax looks like this:

{Network marketing|MLM|Multilevel Marketing} is a very {profitable|lucrative|rewarding} {business|home business|work from home business}.

When spun, the software will pick one random term between each set of curly brackets to create variations. The syntax above could produce a number of variations, including:

Network marketing is a very profitable home business.

MLM is a very rewarding work from home business.

Multilevel marketing is a very profitable business.

The idea of article spinning is based on the “duplicate content penalty” theory – that being, submitting exactly the same article to multiple distribution channels will result in only one instance of the article being  indexed in Google and other engines. In theory, good spinning creates variations of the article that are sufficiently different for the search engines to consider them reasonably unique. This should result in lots of articles (all created from the same seed article, all with links to your website) being indexed and available to searchers.

The problem is, even with sophisticated spinning software, the results are only as good as the effort put into it. Many people create articles that don’t make sense and look silly when spun. This is one reason you see so much low-quality and basically useless content on the Internet.

If you put smart, focused effort into spinning articles and understand how it works, and take into account potential readers who might find your articles, the technique can be effective. The problem is that most people neither really understand how it works nor put enough thought and time into it.

Submitting to Junk Article Directories

There are quite a few automated submitters (both software and services that charge monthly fees) on the market that will take your article and submit it to hundreds of article directories. The sales pitches look so good. The truth is, many of these submit to junk directories that accept anything that is sent their way.

Many of these article directories are there simply to make money through Google Adsense and other monetization strategies, and will accept just about any garbage content. The idea is getting as much content as possible to capture as many potential searchers as possible. As a professional marketer, you don’t want articles pointing to your key websites in these junk directories.

The key is submitting to article directories that have higher standards (ezinearticles.com is one example). A good strategy is to write good articles, publish them on your blog first, then submit to quality directories and selected social media sites.

The Bottom Line in Article Marketing

Article marketing is a fantastic way to get exposure for your brand and your business. If you’re a professional who is building your brand and reputation, post your best material on your blog, then post in social media and in quality directories like Ezine Articles. For social media site posts, you can write short variations on the same topic and link them back to your main article on your blog.

Think about your branding. Your online reputation. You don’t want articles out there that look bad linking back to your main blog or website, nor do you want your quality material published side by side with junk articles.

There is an annoying trend among Facebook users who come on board primarily to promote home business opportunities and products. Armed with hope and good intentions, they try hard but  just don’t get it.

Since I am involved in a home business and write a great deal on the subject, I often get friend requests on Facebook from people who are seeking to meet and network with other like minded entrepreneurial spirits. I check their profile, and if we appear to have similar interests and ambitions, I accept them as a new Facebook friend.

Lately, I’ve noticed a few that I wish I had never accepted as friends. One person in particular announces promotions and invitations to check out a home business opportunity on a regular basis – at least twice a week. Others may only send out an ad like this a couple times a month, but not surprisingly, that’s all I ever see from them. A promotion for something.

Folks, please think about this. Do you like people getting in your face and only communicating with you when they want to sell you something? Or sign you up to make money off of your efforts?

I know you mean well, and I understand your passion and enthusiasm for promoting your business. I’d rather get to know and associate with one person like you who has a dream and a passion for achieving it, than a thousand people who have given up and live life with a negative attitude and chip on their shoulder!

What I’d like to ask you to do is consider your approach. The key to getting what you want is providing value to others. If you use Facebook and have 100 people agree to be your friend, then send them little or nothing more than promotions and invitations to join whatever you’re doing, do you really think they’ll respect you and look up to you as a leader? Will they perceive you as a person they would enjoy knowing and working with?

I doubt it.

If you’ve managed to get a few leads and maybe some other action by doing it this way, you’ll probably think I’m just crazy. What you may not see, though, is how much you could have accomplished if you had focused on providing value instead of just concentrating on selling and recruiting people.

Ultimately…and please think hard about this…ultimately your best success in online network marketing, direct sales, and other “people businesses” will come from providing value and publishing content that brands you as an authority and leader in your niche. This will attract interest in you and your opportunity, and the quality of prospects you get this way is far superior to any you get from just blasting promotions out to everyone.

Leaders (the prospects you want to attract) are drawn to other leaders (that should be YOU) when they are looking for opportunity.