5 List Building Secrets You Can Use Today

You've heard it before: the money is in the list, and building your list is one of the keys to your success. Not your personal email contact list – your friends and relations. It's the email addresses of people who have expressed interest in your business or your knowledge. These are the people who pay attention to you because they believe in may be in their best financial interests to do so.

Here are the steps you need to take to make it.

One: Automate Your List Building

Start using an auto-responder. There are several auto-responder web sites. The most well-known are Aweber and iContact. Your first step should be to create an account on the one of your choice, then create a list and at least one capture form.

Two: Turn Your Blogs into Articles

If a blog post is already 400-600 words, it's nearly ready to go. Just change some of the wording here and there and make a copy. You will use the original and the “spun” copy in step four.

Three: Put in the Links

Make sure your article has some links in it pointing back to your web site. Some directories limit the number of links they allow, and too many links looks unprofessional anyway.

Four: Spread the Word

Now take your spun article and post it on four or five of the prominent article directories: Ezine Articles, Article Alley, Go Articles and a couple of others. Be sure you follow their guidelines; they frown on naked advertising. Just make sure your article offers some real information.

Five: Rinse and Repeat

Repeat steps two, three and four. That's it. The more often you create and publish new material, the faster your list will grow.

But don't forget that every business is a people business, and your list is a list of people. You need to communicate with them effectively, discover their needs and help them succeed. You will still need an effective system and learn the “tricks of the trade”. If you want to see how others are doing it and how YOU can apply our strategy to your business and see massive results, take our FREE 3-day training "The Secrets Behind Social Media".

The Importance of Attitude to Your Success

If you are reading this, then you are probably reading other articles on home-based business, network marketing, social media marketing, etc. There is a lot to learn if you are to succeed. In fact, the learning never stops. Learning is essential to growth, and growth is the only sure sign of life.

You have probably also read books like The Power of Positive Thinking, Think and Grow Rich and others. If you haven't read those books – and many others that I will not name right here – you should. The distilled essence of their message is that your choices and actions got you where you are today, your attitude is the sole determinant of your success, and that you are at all times in total control of your attitude.

Sound strange? Believe it. I know there are times when it seems like everything is going wrong and none of it is your fault. That may in some sense be true, but if you let events determine your attitude and shape your outlook, then you will always have a victim mentality. You will, in fact, be a victim of your own negative attitude, rather than those external circumstances.

One fundamental piece of advice offered by all the motivators is that you must make it a daily practice to feed yourself positive ideas, images, words, music, whatever lifts you up, makes you smile and believe that you can take on whatever the day has in store for you. Zig Ziglar put it this way: “People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing – that's why we recommend it daily.”

The bad news is that you will experience adversity of one kind or another. That is the way of things; adversity comes to everyone at some point. Those who have embraced the practices of self-mastery will rise above the inevitable set-backs and continue on to success. You can be one of them. Whatever you convince yourself will happen is the thing that will happen.

There is one more important item. You are not alone in this world (you probably noticed). Others have the same ups and downs that you have, and would benefit from encouragement the same as you would. Please note that it matters little whether or not you have any standing with the person in question; each of us has the remarkable power to lift the spirits of another with no more than a kind word or sincere compliment, which costs us nothing.

Which brings up my final point: the importance of a team. This is also a key element mentioned time and time again by the success gurus. Your team is all those people who are part of your success, whether as a mentor, a colleague or a cheerleader. If you are just starting out, you need to find those people. There are links on this page to a 3-day video training in “The Secrets Behind Social Media” which will also put you in touch with an energetic team of Internet marketers you can join to experience piece of the success picture.

Baby Boomers and This Miserable Economy – What To Do?

I'm a Baby Boomer. I grew up with Howdy Doody (in black and white of course), '55 T-birds, the Everly Brothers, blue jeans, Keds high-tops and crew cuts. Bread was twenty-five cents a loaf and gasoline was often less than that per gallon – and regular gas was 95 octane. Those really were the good old days, at least in economic terms.

My dad had the same job (with promotions) for 44 years. It was much the same for nearly everyone we knew. Those days are gone. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of us will have worked for 11 or more employers before hitting 65. And that fact has played merry hob with our retirement prospects.

Even if the economy were in better shape, our prospects for employment would be less than optimal. Which is a shame, because, on average, we have a wealth of valuable experience and – according to some – a better work ethic than is commonly found nowadays.

Which is why, more and more, we see Baby Boomers involved in entrepreneurial endeavors, such as network marketing, affiliate marketing and the like. These offer great opportunities to turn those personal assets into income. That's good. These kinds of businesses can be really profitable and can more than make up for non-existent retirement funds.

Those who take this path, however, eventually discover that there are two elements to such a business: the product or service and the marketing approach. The most common experience by far is to join a company first and figure out or learn a marketing approach next.

And this is putting the cart before the horse. Every tradesman knows to assemble his tools and plan a course of action before starting on the work. As Michael Dillard famously observed, network marketing is usually undertaken by people who have no training or experience in marketing. It would be a lot smarter to learn something about marketing before committing to any company, no matter how appealing its offerings may be.

However, as many have discovered, there is a lot to learn; it takes special skills to be successful. Most of us did not pick up those skills on our way to senior citizenship. They can be learned, but it's important to have a good teacher. A quick Internet search reveals that there are lots and lots who claim to be just that, offering sure-fire systems to take you to the top. All for a price, of course.

A good education isn't free, but how is one to sort out the wheat from the chaff in all this? Well, after looking at a fair few of these “gurus”, and paying some of them for their stuff, I developed some guidelines.

1. If there are breathless claims of instant success, keep looking. It's not impossible to start making money right away, but your common sense will tell you that it's not very likely.
2. Ignore money-back guarantees. Even if the information is worth its weight in gold, the real money probably won't start coming in until after the trial period has expired.
3. Make sure your sponsor or mentor (they're not always the same person) is available and shows a real interest in seeing to it that you “get it”. Have some conversations with the people with whom you will be working before you commit.
4. Find out if the program has a day-by-day, step-by-step action plan. I was always willing to do what it took, but I didn't know what that was. You don't know what you don't know, and you don't even know you didn't know it until you know it.
5. Those promoting the should be giving away some valuable information for free. This will keep you from buying a pig in a poke.

If you can plug into a system like this, then it almost doesn't matter what your primary business is. Take this free 3-day video training “The Secrets Behind Social Media” to make sure you put your marketing horse before your business cart.

Using Social Media to Build Your Business

 

 

Social media is all the rage on the Internet. If you don't have accounts on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn and a dozen others then you are behind the times. This is especially so if you are not using social media to expand your business.

Or is this all just a passing fad?

Well, history may have some lessons for us here. The radio, rotary-dial telephones (remember those?), television, personal computers, color monitors, cellular phones, the Internet itself – all these at one time or another appeared to be fads – toys for the government, big business, the rich or those infatuated with gadgets. Now we all have these so called gadgets and, truth be told, sometimes we wonder how we managed without them (which would be an interesting subject for a dissertation). The real lesson, from a business perspective, is that all the innovations in communication eventually became important marketing tools. The social media are simply the latest such innovation, and those who learn how to use them effectively stand to reap big rewards. In fact, this is already happening.

If you have a home-based business, or are thinking about starting one, then you cannot afford to ignore this phenomenon. This is especially true if your business is an MLM or network marketing business. It is certainly true that the traditional methods of growing such a business still work – at least as well as they ever did – but why pass up such an extraordinary way to take your message to thousands – maybe millions – of people you could not meet in any other way?

But where to start? It could take weeks to learn the ins and outs of just one of these – Facebook, for example – and even then you could miss some important features. Fortunately, this is not uncharted territory; lots of others have been here before you and have blazed a trail. That's the good news. The bad news is that lots of others have been here before you. Lots and lots. Many are willing to teach you what they know – or at least some of what they know – for a price, but, as in other things, they differ significantly in quality.

And there is a lot to learn. Blogging, domain names, SEO (what's that?), article marketing, backlinking, syndication tribes and more. Then all this has to come together smoothly. When it does, the magic happens, and that makes it all worthwhile.

Here's what to look for in a social media mentor:

• an established personal success record in social media marketing
• actively engaged in social media marketing right now
• show – not just teach – exactly what to do
• show – again, not just teach – exactly how to do it
• provide a step-by-step, day-by-day action blueprint for you to follow
• personally available to answer your questions – you're going to have them

How can you tell whether or not a prospective mentor meets these criteria? Talk to him/her on the phone in advance. Because if he/she is not available to you now, how can you be sure they will be available after you sign up? There should also be some free, up-front information and guidance to demonstrate the value of what's on the inside. Talk to others who are on the team. Are they experiencing success?

There is simply no question that your business can take off in ways you can hardly imagine once you start using social media marketing. After all, every business is a people business, and the social media really are the new commons, the place where the whole world – indeed, the entire known universe – gathers. Take this free 3-day video training “The Secrets Behind Social Media” as your first step in getting your message to the world.