In any business in the world today, the 80/20 rule always applies. This means that only 20 percent of the people will get something done while the rest of the other 80 percent will disappear into oblivion. It’s called the pareto principles.
The same applies to network marketing success. The majority of people will not do anything. Only 20 percent of the people actually get around to doing something about it. But unfortunately, only a small percentage of THAT 20 percent actually achieves network marketing success (some give up after they fail to see results or because they move on to other commitment – not network marketing’s fault).
The first thing you must do in order to take the first step towards achieving network marketing success is to have a dream. Not just any dream but a dream that is HUGE. Do not let other people tell you what you can or can’t do. In Donald Trump’s own words, “If you are going to think, you might as well think big.” After all, you are already thinking anyway, so you might as well think big and achieve big. If you don’t have a dream, a compelling reason to keep you going when the going gets tough, you will definitely drop out from network marketing after you run into challenges.
Besides having a dream, you must have a blueprint for success. It is also not enough to have the ‘WHY’, you must have the ‘HOW’ as well otherwise you will have a big dream and it just stops at the dream part (because your dream never becomes a reality). The lack of the proper marketing, the ‘HOW’, in the Network Marketing industry is the number one reason of the high attrition rate of 97% in the industry. Normally, when a newbie Network Marketer joins a company, he/she is taught to learn everything about the company and the products. The next step would be to learn about recruiting other people to join his/her team. The newbie marketer is taught that to achieve the financial freedom that prompted him/her to join the business to begin with, he/she needs to build his/her business by recruiting as many people as possible to his/her business. This kind of teaching is taught over and over again until it’s become the principle of any Network Marketing business. While the teaching is true, the overemphasis on the recruiting has created a RA-RA-RA (Recruit Anyone, Recruit Anytime, Recruit Anywhere) mentality, which unfortunately has diminished the credibility of the traditional Network Marketing overtime. The focus on the products somehow got lost and we end up having bunch of Network Marketers running around trying to talk people into joining his/her business with a hefty promise of easy and instant financial freedom. The people that got recruited then start implementing the same RA-RA-RA teaching and recruit other people. And the rampant recruiting continues. There is one significant problem with this method of prospecting. It’s not TARGETED. It’s like casting your line into the water and hope some fish would come by. Yes, some may come by, but how long do you need to wait for this to happen and how many more lines do you have to cast to catch enough fish? Instead of throwing some random lines, can you imagine if you throw a specific line into the water to catch some specific fish? The case is the same with prospecting and marketing in the Network Marketing. What’s the point of putting your effort into prospecting random folks who you don’t know if they have any aspirations to own their own business, may not be willing to devote their time and some money to learn the business, the marketing and prospecting skills required to be succesful, and may think that their uplines are supposed to spoon feed them everything and build their business for them? Wouldn’t this kind of prospecting be like trying to shoot darts in the dark? With tons of business opportunities popping up everywhere, online and offline, it is imperative for network marketers to learn the skills required to do targeted marketing and prospecting.
There are a lot of network marketing prospecting methods that are considered obsolete by today’s standards. You cannot just do cold calling and pester your friends and relatives by forcing them to join your network marketing opportunity. You need to learn how to handle people and use the Internet to generate leads for your business.
You also need to structure your action plan properly because you need to know how to execute your plans to make your dream a reality. An action plan that works out day by day, week by week, month by month and year by year.
Write down on your time table, what you need to achieve this very day – reading a motivational book, engaging in prospecting activities, retailing some products to your customers and spending time with your downlines training and coaching them. In the world of Internet Network Marketing, I would several activities that would be crucial to your online prospecting and marketing success. They are build your online presence, give valuable content to your prospects, and market your website(s). One tool that I use everyday to list my day to day activities that will help me in achieving several milestones of my business is the Microsoft Outlook. I like using it because it has an activity’s start and due date, importance/priority (high, normal or low), reminder (from 5 minutes up to 2 weeks reminder) and percent completion (this will keep track of how much percentage of each activity that has been completed).
Having all these features has helped me to keep track of my day to day activities to ensure that whatever I do on daily basis is in line with the importance of each activity. For example, if I have multiple activities that are due on the same day, since I rank them by the order of importance/priority, I usually focus my time and effort on completing the activities that have high importance level. The importance level is usually determined by my goal. For example, my goal is to have 100 unique visitors per day for my blog. To achieve it, by tracking my efforts, I know that I have to write 1 article per week about the subject that’s near and dear to my heart, internet network marketing and affiliate marketing, and then submit my article to several popular article directories, then writing 1 article per week will be one of my important activity to do. Therefore, I will mark it in the outlook as such. If you are on a shoe string budget, as the cost of the Microsoft Office suite is not cheap, I found this free to-do tool online that you might want to try. You can sign up for this service with toodledo.com. See below of the toodledo to-do list screenshot.
The best part about toodledo.com is you can add this as a gadget to your igoogle.com homepage.
Without a definite day to day plan, your day will definitely slip by without much action. At the end of the day, it is all about you – don’t rely on your uplines or your downlines for success because if you do, you are building their business instead of your own.
