Archive for the ‘Sponsoring Methods’ Category

My friend and colleague, Lou Abbott, author of MLM — The Whole Truth, created this video about binary compensation plans and why they’re not a plus for REAL network marketers. See if you agree with him or not…

I just read yet another MLM-related blog post that talks about how you should “edify your upline” when talking about them to your prospects. This seems to be a peculiarly-US interpretation of the verb “to edify” — or is it just peculiar to people in network marketing?

First clue: “to edify” someone does NOT mean to “glorify, extol, exalt, worship, revere, reverence, venerate, pay homage to, honour, adore, thank, give thanks to, laud, magnify, ennoble, elevate, dignify, enhance, augment, promote, praise, celebrate, lionize, acclaim, applaud, hail, glamourize, idealize, romanticize, enshrine, immortalize” or any similar expression.

Second clue: “to edify” actually means to “educate, instruct, teach, school, tutor, train, guide; enlighten, inform, cultivate, develop, improve, better, uplift, inspire” or similar.

Does that sound like something you’d try to do to your upline? Or that they’re likely to appreciate from you?

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Back in 1980 Australia’s largest telco, Telecom, spent untold millions of dollars on a name change to Telstra.

At the time I was advertising manager for a major automotive group that was awarded a fleet contract for supplying hundreds of new commercial vehicles that had to be branded with the new corporate name and logo and I was curious about why the company felt the need to change it’s name at such cost.

I had my suspicions, of course. This was an outfit that was a former government department before it was privatized, and its attitude to customer service was always… well, let’s just say it was toxic. It was perceived by the public as a corrupt corporate citizen. It had been embroiled in a series of scandals that had ruined many small business customers through vindictive practices by middle managers and its reputation had deteriorated to the point where it was universally despised and ridiculed.

What I didn’t expect was for the company’s head of public relations to state, candidly, on a current affairs television interview that the reason for this massively-expensive name change was the fact that so many people loathed the company that the board felt that a new name was needed.

Huh?

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We all get ’em… the ignorant morons with minds wide shut. This is a classic. Be sure to share it with your friends. Then go to http://IsItaPyramid.com to learn more about illegal pyramid selling schemes and why they’re illegal — and how they differ from REAL network marketing (and why it’s 100% legal and ethical).

Axel Schultze* is a respected social media commentator. In a penetrating article in this week’s issue of CustomerThink he confirms what I’ve suspected for a few months now: that the social media bubble, like other bubbles over the past decade, is about to burst. The tell-tale warning signs are all there if you know what to look for.

People are recognizing already that the endless hours of watching the incoming streams from Twitter and Facebook or all the status updates on LinkedIn are hours wasted. All the paid tweets and people or agencies, who have been hired to tweet are not going to contribute to the bottom line. And the fan pages people build to get “fans, followers, connections” are just hopes that it will do something for the business – but it won’t.

Yet, there are businesses who not only survived during the economic down turn but actually showed significant growth. What did they do differently as most are also associated with the rise of social media? The answer is SO SIMPLE that most people will reject the truth and continue to look for the holy grail. The answer is “They become more social with their customers”. Socializing is work, it takes time and focus, discipline and a clear understanding [of] what to do and what not to do. And as 80% of humans continue to look for getting the job done automatically and get rich instantly, they will leave the social web because they just learned again and again – there is no free lunch.

He’s no harbinger of doom and gloom, however. There’s plenty to be optimistic about, provided you do the right things for the right reasons.

The biggest benefit of social media is to do more business with more people in a grander geography and in less time than ever before. But it comes at a price. And the price you pay is to be more open, more social, more connected, more interactive, more helpful and more conversational than ever before. And that means you cannot much longer be busy just slicing and dicing your data and aggregate information for even more knowledge about your demographics or aggregate more information to even better target your mail shots and advertising – NO you got to get out there and have a dialog with your customers. No time to do that? You will have a lot of time to think about it when you are fired or your business ceased operations. Being social is work – one customer at a time.

Can you automate?
Automation is sand in the social gearbox.

If you’re interested in social networking as the new Holy Grail of MLM prospecting and recruiting, it will pay you to read this article first before doing anything else — especially spending your money on some of the over-hyped, over-priced social networking courses currently on offer.

If you’re familiar with my 2007 Insight Report, “What the ‘Gurus’ WON’T Tell You! Facts, Fallacies, Fantasies, Fables and Falsehoods of Internet Marketing” (How to separate the ahah! from the rah-rah, ga-ga and ca-ca), this will all sound discouragingly familiar. If you’re not familiar with it, click here to learn more. (Scroll down the page.)

* Social media practitioner, CEO of Xeesm, founder of the Social Media Academy, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, book author of “Channel Excellence”, frequent speaker at industry events, and winner of the 2008 SF Entrepreneur award.

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I rarely bother attending free webinars these days. Apart from not having the time (or the ability to sit through sessions up to 3 hours long), most are little more than poorly-presented pitches for new products or training programs.

But tomorrow (Wednesday in the USA, Thursday in Australia and Asia), Better Networker is presenting a free webinar by Katie Freiling, a genuine whiz at building FREE network marketing leads using social media like Facebook and Twitter. She has the runs on the board over the past year to get my attention, very firmly. She’ll be outlining her exact formula in an in-depth interview by Tim Erway, Mike Dillard’s partner.

(Sorry… the webinar is now over.)

That’s 10am Thursday for anyone in Eastern Australia. (Time zone finder here.)

Yes, there’ll doubtless be a sales pitch involved, but that’s fine… fair exchange. (It’s only when a webinar is all feathers and no meat that I lose interest, fast.)

Details and registration are at http://getwwn.com/.

Michael Stelzner has long been regarded as the #1 “go-to” guy for expertise on marketing using white papers, with very good reason. He’s savvy and talented. He gives advice that gets results. For the past year he’s also been publishing outstanding content on using social media for marketing and business building in his excellent “Social Media Examiner” newsletter and blog. If you’re using social media — including social bookmarking and social networking — signing up for Michael’s FREE newsletter (and visiting his super-useful blog) could be the best move you make in 2010. You’ll find them here…

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com

Do yourself a huge favour. Visit soon!

The other week I wrote about a “dummy-spit” by Rob Toth. An old friend recently reminded me about another “dummy-spit”, many years ago, at Melbourne’s Dallas Brookes Hall by Brad Sugars. Brad was just starting out in the speaking and coaching game. It was a free seminar pitching Brad’s coaching and consulting services, from memory.

What I do remember, vividly, is Brad’s tantrum on stage, in front of 400 small business owners.

Just before the break he’d delivered a full-on pitch for attendees to sign up during the break for what was, at the time, a fairly expensive coaching program for which he hadn’t really established the perceived value needed to justify the price.

When he discovered that very few sign-ups had occurred, he harangued his audience for more than ten minutes after the break, accusing them of being unresponsive, short-sighted, unimaginative, unadventurous… and he was talking to 400 small business owners? People who’d risked everything they owned to take charge of their own destinies?

It didn’t go down well. (Surprise, surprise!)

By my estimation, at the time, around one third of his audience walked out. It was a monumental error of judgment and it damaged his credibility in the country’s second biggest market for some time.

To Brad’s credit, he learned from that debacle, bounced back and now heads a highly successful international business coaching operation.
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A number of people have asked me what I mean by the terms “Push” and “Pull” used in the explanations of the different types of arrows on page 7 of the PearlMaker Overview document (see previous post).

Waaaay back in the mid 1990s there was a concept called “push” versus “pull” communications. Nowadays they’re known by other, more fancy names (see “Barker’s Eggs”) like “Attraction Marketing”, “The Secret”, “Interruption Advertising”, “Permission Marketing” and similar. (Branding is everything in the 21st century.)

I still like “push” and “pull”. Their simplicity and clarity have always appealed to me.

It’s pretty easy to understand: if a message is pushed at you by a publisher or advertiser, that’s “Push”.

If you have the choice to request messages be sent to you with your consent, that’s “Pull”.

Not exactly abstruse, is it?

It’s like the three forms of selling (there are only three, by the way. Anyone who says otherwise is just trying to sell you something.)

1. Advertising — which pulls the consumer toward your offer.
2. Visual Merchandising — which pushes your offer toward the (hopefully) rapidly approaching consumer.
3. Personal Selling Skills — which close any gap left by the first two.

Unfortunately, impatient sellers couldn’t wait for consumers to be pulled toward their offers, so they created ways to push their ads by invading the personal space of consumers at every opportunity. That glowing example of integrity and intelligence resulted, eventually in such even-handed legal niceties as the “Do Not Call” registry and “No Advertising Mail” laws.
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The long-awaited PearlMaker Professional Sponsoring System is finally nearing release… the only Fourth Generation™ system of its kind (five years in development and testing by The Profit Clinic).

Its final structure and sub- systems can be seen in the newly released PearlMaker Overview PDF document (15 pages) available from http://myPearlMaker.com/bulletins/overview-2010.pdf (no registration required).

For all those network marketing professionals who’ve been waiting patiently for this “mother-of-pearl” of all business building systems, it’s time to think about planning for the imminent launch. Stay tuned for announcement of free webinars, pre-launch templates and more in the coming week.
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