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Lately I have noticed a trend in marketing. Camping out on the government economic stimulus topic. For example, Dominos pizza has a “stimulus” deal, which of course is nothing more than a sale. Same thing, different word. I think it’s now becoming cliche and/or a buzzword. I got an email today from an information marketer selling a “stimulus” package. Please! I wonder if she really expects me to open that email and buy whatever she was selling?
Now that I think of it, the prior administration’s tax rebates got the same treatment. ”Spend your rebate here” and all that. No one likes gimmicky marketing although it might work for pizza. For home based businesses, network marketing, and info products, it just looks like cheap shots.
If you have a network marketing business, you’ll need to devote time to it. And there is no better way to manage your time than with a schedule. So set a schedule for your business and then stick to it.
Make it realistic! Don’t say you’re going to put in 6 hours on Wednesday if your Wednesday is already filled. But you need to also make a decent commitment to the time. At the minimum, devote at least 12 to 15 hours a week to working on your network marketing business.
Also decide in advance what kinds of activities you will do on your allotted time. Off to the side somewhere, you should have master task list. A list of all the things you are working on, should be working on, and might want to work on. Use this list to load your schedule with focused work.
Follow a productive schedule, and your network marketing business can’t help but grow.
If it’s good enough for Donald Trump isn’t it good enough for anyone? That’s a loaded question of course, but I did notice that “The Donald” is now in the Network Marketing industry. He has started an MLM called “Trump Network” which seems to be in that nebulous but crucial state of “Pre Launch”. It’s set to launch in October of 2009.
About all you can do at the site right now is either sign on to the newsletter or listen to his audio message. But it’s interesting that Donald Trump is adding his weight to the industry. Overall, I think that’s really good for the industry that he is adding his voice to the business model. No matter how you feel about Mr. Trump, this provides a vote of confidence from a proven entrepreneur. Now he joins other well known people lending their name to Network Marketing: Robert Kiyosaki and Depak Chopra.
Does that automatically make this a good network marketing opportunity to join? NO! Some people are anxious to join any network marketing in pre launch if they think it has some potential. But those are the people who are usually looking to cash in on the pre launch and the early months of network marketing company. Then they end up moving on to something else.
I’m not saying the Trump Network is good or bad, I’m just saying that if you want to invest your time (and money) into a network marketing opportunity, you should do for reasons other than the fact there is a celebrity endorsing it. Do your due diligence on the opportunity and then decide.
Download your free copy of How to Select the Perfect Network Marketing Company – and enjoy!
A few posts back I wrote about making sure your downline has some sort of plan to work from. Too many times, people just sign someone up and then let them go on their own. There is one BIG problem with that approach. If your downline is not successful, then neither will you be! If your downline is struggling, then your bottom line suffers. So why on earth would someone just abandon their current downline seeking new ones?
The mindset there is chasing after the sign on bonus while ignoring the long term residual that can your downline (if properly equipped) can be bringing you. It’s the basic chasing after short term rewards versus long term residual money.
That is one of the reasons that my plan is something I can pass along to my downline. I wrote and planned it out with duplicability in mind as well. So not only does it give them a road map to follow, but in turn, they can give it to their downline to follow.
Everyone’s talking about unemployment nowadays; it’s high on everyone’s topic list. Not me of course, since I no longer have ‘job’ mentality. I left that behind many years ago. But there is another group of people – the underemployed. People who have the skills and presumably the education to make decent money but who have ‘been forced to’ work at menial, lesser paying jobs. Below is a link to a Seattle Times article that focuses on a few case studies of this phenomenon. It calls these types of jobs ’survival jobs’. Examples would be a former director of a large company working in a call center.
I suspect there are a lot of people who fall under this category. And they’re not on the radar since they aren’t counted in unemployment statistics. Those statistics, enormously flawed, are based on those people who claim unemployment benefits. This makes the problem of financial ‘quality of life’ even bigger than most people realize.
When I read about these people, I often wonder how many of them have thought about running their own home based business. I suspect these are talented, mostly well-educated people and many of them would excel in a network marketing business. It’s sad that they would rather spend 40 hours a week at a menial job barely squeaking by (in some cases not even making enough for the mortgage), when they could spend the same 40 hours building a business. Building something that would carry them further into the future than a job ever would. I wish I could throw cold water on these folks and say “wake up!”. But I can only do what I can with people who have already ‘woken up’ and hope these other talented individuals will do the same.
