Andy Acciaioli

How much time you can devote to building your network marketing / mlm business while holding a full time job is a case of simple math.

We all have 168 hours a week. Let’s deduct 100 hours representing your full time job (assuming you work 40 hours), a conservative half-hour commute to/from work and 8 hours of sleep each night (like we get 8 hours of sleep). Suppose you spend 6 hours daily preparing meals, having meals, getting ready to go to work, doing laundry, doing dishes, cleaning the house, helping with homework, etc. This leaves you with 26 hours to spend on your business, right? Wrong. What about the shopping that has to be done? And spending quality time with the children.

With that type of exhausting schedule, you will be extremely lucky to find an hour each day to build your network marketing / mlm business.

When you do settle in, make every minute count. You will find many weapons of mass distraction that will attempt to rob you of focusing solely on taking care of and building your business.

EMAIL. Sort through it quickly: respond first to team members who have questions or situations needing your attention. No time to open email with forward jokes or pictures of cute Chihuahuas dressed up in tuxedos and formal gowns. DISTRACTION.

SKYPE. Your team members or upline may have left you messages on Skype. Rapidly respond to these but avoid the temptation to make a Skype return call. We all know it’ll turn into a time waster. And, definitely do not answer any Skype calls of a personal nature as these too are time wasters. DISTRACTION.

SOCIAL MEDIA. Using social media such as Twitter or Facebook is extremely effective in building your business. The clock is ticking, zero time to read and answer personal messages simply open, read and answer any communication about your business. With Twitter, use a service to accept followers, delete those who do not follow you and, definitely, automate your Twitter Tweets. Reading the gazillion Tweets that fill your screen: DISTRACTION.

PHONE CALLS. There is perhaps no greater usurper of your time than the telephone. Especially when you get a dear friend, let’s call her Chatty Kathy (my wife’s name is Kathy, sorry dear) who wants to give you every excruciating detail of her day. The simplest solution for these interruptions: let your answering machine handle these DISTRACTIONS, not you. (One of my elder aunts will call and speak to our answering machine as though it is part of our family. Problem is, she calls it four or five times in a row to keep adding to her original message.)

TELEVISION. Wait a minute. I plan my weeknights according to my TV Guide: American Idol, Biggest Loser, Grey’s Anatomy, Seinfeld re-runs, etc. Exactly how much money are they paying you to watch these TV shows? That’s what I thought. A half-hour of this DISTRACTION will turn into an hour or two and there goes your business building time.

These are very basic distractions. I’m sure you can think of and experience more. Your objective in building your mlm business is to eventually replace your full time job income so you can then free up 40 – 50 hours of work related time to continue building your business even bigger…and, of course, having an occasional coffee with Chatty Kathy to get caught up on neighborhood gossip.

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Most network marketing companies supply their representatives/distributors with a lead capture page website as soon as you join that particular company. These websites are commonly referred to as replicated websites since they all look the same with only a simple modification to include your name or your username.

The advantage of using a replicated website is speed and, hopefully, results. Since only your name and perhaps your telephone are added to a website template, it is usually up and running instantaneously. It is assumed that your network marketing company has tested each item on the page (headline, video and copy, etc.) to obtain the best response rate from that replicated page.

The disadvantage is that most of these replicated pages have a “me too” look to them. Although the company is branded by your using their page, you are not. If your company has 100,000 representatives or distributors, chances are that everyone will have the same replicate page though some companies offer small variations such as background colors.

We hear the term “branding yourself” as leading to your success in marketing your business over the internet. What is it that will make your brand – the YOU Inc. – stand out from everyone else? Specifically, what will make your replicated website stand out from all of the other replicated websites in your particular network marketing company?

You could spend a bunch of money to have your own lead capture page designed and programmed to capture all leads for you. This is an option that I would not recommend and I am quite sure it would probably be frowned upon by your company. (The lead capture process is probably tied-in to your back office and from the company’s prospective they certainly would not want everyone to tinker with their system that is working just fine.)

A simple tweaking of the process can do two things: build YOUR brand (YOU Inc.) and at the same time make your landing page unique before attempting to capture that visitor as a lead.

How is this possible?

Put a landing page in front of your company supplied, replicated lead capture page/website. Make it extremely plain and easy to read. Put your picture on it with a statement to the effect of what type of help you (and your company) can offer. For example, if you offer a weight loss product make a descriptive statement such as “I can help you lose 27 pounds over the next 63 days”.

To see a working example of how well this works, you can take a look at my landing page: http://www.GlobalMarketersOnline.com

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“I can’t believe it,” one of my personally sponsored reps gushed over the phone a couple of months ago. He continued: “I nabbed this network marketing pro from XYZ Co. He has over 500 people underneath him, can you imagine what that will mean to me? My business is finally taking off right into the stratosphere. All due to this one person and the numbers he’s going to bring to the table.”

Hm. Here we are a few months later. Our superstar has yet to shine. Matter of fact, our superstar has yet to sponsor a single person onto our team. Don’t get me wrong, he talked a good game but has yet to walk the walk. When he first came into the business he wanted to talk to everyone upline to him, except, of course, his sponsor whom he assumed did not have the knowledge base nor the network marketing experience to deal with someone at his level.

And talk to upline he did. And he did. And he did.

It got so that I would flat out tell him at the start of every of our many conversations that I could only talk to him for two minutes tops. The proverbial straw came when he called to ask me about my weather as it was sunny where he was. I told him as gently as I could that if in the future he had any network marketing questions in general or questions about our company or its products in particular, by all means give me a call. But he should get his weather reports online.

In this case, and I’m sure you have your own examples, talk is not cheap. It is costly to my team’s growth as it is/will be to your team’s growth unless you take back control of your time.

I have not heard back from him. Nor have I heard from anyone else on his team. Oh, wait a minute, last time I checked there was no one on the superstar’s team except for him.

If a network marketing superstar is really a superstar they will be just as protective of your time as they are of their own. They will use email or the phone to communicate and seek information from you (and their upline) not for general chit-chat.

As your team grows, you will find your own stars who may have started their network marketing careers as a mere flicker. But now, they light up your organization and your bank account.

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One fundamental factor in your network marketing business is that not all of your team members are in it for the long haul. As a matter of fact, a good number of those that you sponsor will last anywhere from a few months to under a year.

There are a variety of reasons for this parting of the ways: this network marketing divorce. But one of the primary causes for your representative to lose interest is that he/she is not making any money. They keep spending and spending and to their dismay their faith dwindles as they begin giving their business less and less of their effort.

In time they stop their autoship orders to conserve on spending.

Not being able to blame themselves, they turn around and blame you, your company and/or your product or service. But most of the blame is directed at you, their sponsor for getting them involved in the business in the first place.
After all, you were the one who presented the opportunity to them as a slam dunk money maker so easy that anyone can do it…even a caveman.

And now, your phone calls and emails are not returned.

It is unfortunate that your rep has quit but you have to stop trying to breathe life into someone who has given up completely. Your energy should be directed to other team members who are working the business.

Do not dwell on what you could have done differently. Should you have toned down the excitement of the presentation? Should you have stressed that the business was hard work? Should you have punched up the fact that rejection is a major part of network marketing?

For the sake of your organization, you have to move on. Maintain an attitude of “it is what it is”.

You have seen to it that the person was fully trained. I am sure that you were there to answer any questions and give advice whenneeded. Accept the fact that 97% of network marketers make $10 or less per week…with only 3% earning more than that. To be a part of the 3% takes a lot of work. Just as it takes a lot of work to operate and succeed at running a traditional business.

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With over 70% of Americans seeking to start their own business, the question becomes what type of business do they want to start? And, how much capital will they need?

Suppose you go to your local Subway Sandwich Shop and notice the line is out the door with customers eager to place their sandwich orders which are then processed with military speed and precision. You could be spending up to $240,000 just to open your doors. This will require a high volume location just to pay back your opening and operating expenses. Of course, these fixed expenses must be paid out before you realize any sort of profit.

Perhaps making sandwiches does not appeal to you but a cleaning and restoration business such as Servpro does. The capital you have to come up with is from $100,000 to $160,000. And that is before you do your first job.

I doubt that there are many of the 70%+ Americans who want to start their own business that will have that kind of cash in their cookie jar. Especially in this economy.

The alternative? A non-traditional business such as a network marketing business opportunity. The capital is quite low – from a couple of hundred to a thousand dollars – to enter the business of your choice. And with over 4,800 network marketing companies to choose from, what a varied range of opportunities you have to make your selection. Health and wellness products (usually referred to as lotions and potions) account for around 2,000 network marketing businesses.

Unlike a traditional business, your network marketing business does not require you to have the expense of a business location outside of your home. Nor do you need to pay any employees to staff your business: you are the one wearing a number of different hats from marketing expert to accounting pro to sales manager…

Typically the only fixed expenses you may have running your network marketing business is whatever your monthly autoship product order is. But the fixed monthly expenses of running a traditional business are gone: rent, utilities, taxes, payroll, etc.

The unfortunate part of a non-traditional or network marketing business is that it is an extremely low cost to get into that business in the first place. So the corollary would be true: that it is extremely easy to walk away from such a low investment. Were you to have paid $240,000 to make sandwiches, chances are that you would not even think about that baloney about walking away from your investment.

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I returned a call to a person who contacted me to learn more about my network marketing business. After I introduced myself, she informed me that those network marketing “things” don’t work”. My response? “Good bye, have a great day.” Dead silence on the other end of the phone as I hung up.

It would have been a total waste of my time to attempt to convince this person that network marketing was a business model that could work depending upon the time and effort that she would put into it. Furthermore, it would have been futile to try to convince her into my business.

Instead, my network marketing gift that I was offering to her was quickly yanked out of her hands so I could offer it to the next person I called. After I hung up, I knew I left her totally flabbergasted as she was hunkering down for a fight which I refused to give her: never match wits with someone with half the equipment.

Had I invested fifteen or thirty minutes of my time bantering with her, the only investment would have been by me: a loss of my time. Even though I would count the call as a “no”, I actually felt pretty good by not allowing her to spew her negativity all over me and only investing a grand total of ten or fifteen seconds.

Someone new to network marketing probably would have defended the industry or their network marketing company. We veterans know enough to pick our battles.

Should that happen to you and you call someone and receive that response, look at it as though you are offering them a financial gift, a business opportunity. And, if they start poking at it, getting all negative, simply pull your gift back and move on to someone else who will be more receptive. By giving a response like the one I gave (“Good bye. Have a great day.”), you will cause the person to be totally dumbfounded or feeling that you are unable to defend yourself/your network marketing industry.

In either case, they will be so stunned by your lack of responding to them that you will leave them speechless…maybe even wondering if they made a mistake by rejecting your opportunity without knowing more about it. Don’t be too surprised if you receive a call in the future from that person with an opening line like, “You know that business opportunity you wanted to talk to me about…”

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In its most simple form a backlink is a link back to your site from another site.  The importance of a backlink is in the search engine optimization of your site.  As websites are crawled by major search engines, they will look at the links that have been placed on a particular website and will count these as votes for the websites that are mentioned.

For example, website A has a link to your website B.  This counts for a vote for your website provided both websites carry relevant content.  If website A has a network marketing blog and links to your article about network marketing, you score a relevant vote by a search engine.  However, if website A is a website dealing with where to purchase cheap medications carries your network marketing article link, this is frowned upon by the search engines as not being a relevant vote for your website.  Or, in a worse case scenario, might consider your website a linkspammer which could negatively impact where (or even if) your page gets ranked or indexed in their search engine.

There are link swapping services which you can join which will blast your link to hundreds or thousands of websites if you agree to carry their members’ links on yours.  If found out (yes, the search engines find out) that you have utilized this technique, you will likewise be treated as a linkspammer.  The links that you place on your website should be 100% relevant to the content of your website or else don’t even think about carrying that link.  It’s not worth the risk.

PageRank (a system exclusively licensed to Google from Stanford University)  determines the importance of a backlink.  For example, if website A which has a PageRank of 3 and its content is devoted to network marketing, carries a link to your PageRank 1 website with your network marketing article, theoretically their vote (or backlink) for your website is worth more than your vote (or backlink) to their website.

Why is all this backlink and PageRank important?  If you want to secure one of the prized positions at the top of the search engines for your website, you should know how to get there.  Otherwise it’s like you loaded your family into your car for a cross country trip without a GPS or book of maps and thought you would get to San Diego by simply heading west.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complex science.  And, just when you think you have a pretty good handle on it, beware: some geek-o-maniac on the search engine side will change the rules and you have to relearn some new SEO strategy.

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Remember Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare? The hare made a mad dash at the start of the race then turned around to observe the tortoise (named Slow and Steady) moving ever so slowly. So the hare decided to sit and rest because it would be impossible for the tortoise to catch up to him. Instead of just resting, the hare fell asleep and the tortoise not only caught up with him but passed him by and was the first to cross the finish line. What woke the hare up was the cheering of the fans for the winner, the tortoise.

Over the years, I have observed my share of network marketing tortoises and hares. While most individuals are just that “individuals”, there are some character traits that both slow business builders and fast business builders exhibit.

The tortoises tend to build their businesses slowly and methodically…usually adding a representative and then spending a great deal of time assisting that representative getting started properly. Rarely does a tortoise type of representative have to spend extra time retraining one of their new representatives. The rep retention seems to be greater when a tortoise trained representative feels confident about the company, the management and the product(s) as each has been explained in detail.

The hare focuses on quickly building his/her business as rapidly as humanly possible. Usually plugging their new representative into an online training program (which, by the way, are usually excellent) so that he/she can move on to sponsoring another representative. And another one. And another one. Sometimes, depending upon the personality of the “hare” leader, they will curtly respond to their new rep’s questions with a “Go back over your online training.” Thereby avoiding any time wasting, lengthy discussion. I’m not claiming this is a bad practice since the quality of online tutorials is oftentimes better and more informative than an explanation we may give. However, if the hare type of person gives this response to a new representative with a tortoise personality, this could shake the confidence of the newbie to the point where if he/she received this response repeatedly, the hare would lose this representative.

When I was with Amway, years ago, there was a couple in their 70’s who just made it to the Diamond level after having been in the business for over 25 years. We would have probably quit after a month and a half: heck, if we can’t make Diamond in 6 weeks, we’re out of here. They referred to themselves as the Energizer bunnies: they just kept going and going and going.

Whether you consider yourself a hare or a tortoise, the only way you will not cross the finish line and reach your goal will be if you quit. If, however, you just keep going and going and going…however long it takes…you will reach the financial and promotion level of your dreams.

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Perhaps you have been involved with your network marketing business for months (or years) and have little to show for it.  As a result you are on the fence about quitting the business and writing off the money spent as a costly learning experience.  Let’s face it the only reason why you stuck it out this long is because you had hoped that it would be different next month, next week or tomorrow.

Miraculously a network marketing superstar would find you and practically beg to get on your team.

Then you woke up and realized that it was all a dream.  There was no superstar waiting in the wings to jump into your business, just a bunch of your team members having a worse morale than you.  All are either on the fence about quitting or have mentally quit your network marketing team.

Instead of simply (and I use “simply” knowing that it is far from simple) replacing your network marketing company OR replacing your team, it is more important that you make the attempt to revitalize yourself and your organization.  Is it going to be s snap turning quitting attitudes around?  Can’t you pick-up one of those Staples’ “Easy” buttons and have everything and everyone be motivated once again?

Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.

You have probably heard the expression “when a fish stinks, it stinks from the head”.  Similarly when your team is suffering from possessing a bad morale, it probably started with you.  Perhaps you made a negative comment about your company’s product.  Or about the compensation plan.  Or, worse yet, about your “no nothing” upline. And, you probably made this comment to someone on your team which unbeknownst to you injected/infected your team with a sense of doubt over whether or not they can be successful if you, their upline, were erupting negativity as forceful as Mt. St. Helens.

Doing network marketing trainings over the years, I have often said: throw up don’t throw down.  Meaning, if you get negative consult with your upline (throw your negative comment upline) and NEVER share any negative thoughts or feelings you may be experiencing (throw downs) with your downline.

It is far more difficult, if not impossible, to cure a team that has been injected with cancerous thoughts by its leader.  As a leader building a growing, healthy organization it is your responsibility to keep your team members motivated and focused on succeeding with a constant fertilization of positive goals, praise and affirmations.

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