The Allinson Blog

Business consultants sometimes tell you to “plan your work, and work your plan.”  They’ll also tell you that “failing to plan is like planning to fail.”  As trite and simplistic as those statements may be, they’re also true.  If you dream of becoming a successful internet entrepreneur, create a business plan.  It should explain—primarily to yourself—what it is you are trying to do, and how you intend to do it.  It doesn’t need to be formal nor complicated.  But it does need to be accurate.  Once your plan is in place, go to work and make it happen.

Marketing products and services on the internet is simple—but not easy.  In fact, when thinking about life in general, nothing worth achieving is easy.  If you’re exceptionally gifted in certain areas some things might be easier for you to accomplish than for others.  But if you do whatever it is you do well, then you probably do it with passion.  And whenever you put all of your passion into your actions, it’s never easy.  But it is fun.  As an internet marketer, you can expect to work hard for your success.  But you can also expect to have fun doing it.

If you got involved with network marketing because you thought it would be free, you might want to find something else to do.  As with just about everything else in business, nothing is free in network marketing either.  If you want to become a successful online entrepreneur you’re going to need to make investments in your future.  It’s a wise decision to spend money on marketing, on training, and even on outsourcing some of the less critical tasks.  With that said you’ll still spend far less than you would in a bricks and mortar business—a whole lot less.

As a network marketer, you probably understand and employ the concepts of attraction marketing.  In this form of marketing, you yourself become your primary offer.  People are buying into you.  For that reason, it’s critical not to become stagnant.  Make it a point to continue your personal—and professional—development throughout your entire career.  Even if you feel that you’ve achieved the pinnacle of success, find another pinnacle, and then achieve that.  In order to do this, you need a life plan.  Get crystal clear on what you want and how you plan to get it.  Then go for it.

The recent presidential election highlights a fundamental concept of effective marketing—the message.  Political pundits call it being “on message.”  Obama’s message was the need for change and his plan for how to do it.  He won.  McCain’s message was fuzzy.  He lost.  To be effective in marketing, first craft your message.  Take your offers and figure out how they solve problems.  Distill all of that down into several very compelling value propositions—this is your message.  When you’re talking to prospects, focus on staying “on message.”  The more focused your message is, the more successful you’ll be.

Mike Dillard rocked the MLM world when he put together the concept of magnetic marketing. Like attraction marketing, you put yourself in the center of your marketing sphere, and attract prospects into your funnel based on you, not your products. People seek you out for your expertise and help with their opportunity, as opposed to simply placing small orders for products. The magnetic marketing concept was noteworthy because it was the first time that the MLM model was restructured around viable business marketing principles and monetized. To be successful in direct marketing, you need to become a student of it. Click here for Mike Dillard’s free video training series.

It’s been said that if you’re self-employed, each morning when you wake up you are unemployed.  It’s true, because how you spend your day will determine whether you earn an income or not, as well as how much you’ll earn.  For many people, working out of the home is the ultimate employment situation.  The risk though is that it’s easy to squander your most valuable resource—time.  It’s the ultimate paradox—you have all the time there is, but you never have enough time.  It’s about planning and discipline.  Take some time to learn how to use your time effectively.

If you are engaged in network marketing or MLM, leveraging social networking forums such as Facebook or MySpace should be a fundamental component of your overall attraction marketing strategy.  MySpace alone has over 200,000,000 users.  Before you begin using these forums, make sure you understand how they work and how to tap into them.  Most marketers operating in the social networking universe today are clueless about how to go about it.  Be careful not to be too blatantly commercial or too aggressive in your messaging.  Learn how to access these powerful markets—it will be well worth the time invested.