Last night I had the opportunity to help host a great webinar on getting more customer referrals through relationship marketing. The call was awesome. Over 200 people registered to attend.

Did you know it’s 6x cheaper to get a customer referral or sell a second product to your existing customers? That’s what the experts say. They say it costs 6 to 10 times more to get one new customer than to keep your customers happy. This is one simple way you can keep your customers happy and get more referrals.

Watch the webinar on how to get more customer referrals.

The webinar only lasts about 14 minutes and you can learn all about how to get more customer referrals through relationship marketing. By building relationships you can keep your customers happy to sell them additional products and they will willingly give you referrals who are already ready to buy your product!

Watch our webinar on relationship marketing.

This is a tool I’ve personally used for over 3 years with my own customers.

If you have comments or questions about how this tool can benefit you, just use the contact form to your right to contact me. I’ll be glad to assist you in any way I can.

Regards,
Ben Fitts

Popularity: 17% [?]

This article originally appeared in the October issue of the Network Marketing Magazine.

Read Part 1 of this article on pay per click advertising in MLM. In part 1 we discussed why you shouldn’t use PPC ads in your MLM business. For one thing your downline can’t duplicate what you do, and if they do you’ll be driving up the price each other pays on advertising. My recommendation is to avoid PPC but perhaps you want to give it a go any way.

Now let’s say you insist on using PPC with Google, Yahoo, or MSN. Here are some ideas for you.

Set up your Pay Per Click campaign as a co-op. Set up a page that rotates leads among people on your team. This is REALLY simple to do and you could probably hire someone on RentACoder to do it for 50 dollars or less. Have everyone who wants to participate chip in a little bit to cover the cost of the PPC campaign. Let everyone on your team know that instead of competing against one another in PPC ads you will all work together to dominate the search engines. That way you work together as a team.

You will also want to set up an original lead capture site since you can’t use your company’s self replicated web sites. This might only be a one page site meant to capture names and email addresses. This is called a “squeeze page”. The idea is that you would offer them a free report or series of emails to convince them to opt-in to your marketing. One reason it is important in PPC is because you paid for the user to click on your site, so you’ll want to capture their information in order to keep in touch with them. Most people take 3-6 exposures to your business/product before they purchase. You don’t want to have to pay for them to click on your site 3-6 times! By capturing their email, phone, or mailing address you can keep in touch with them without paying for more clicks. Perhaps in a future issue I can cover this topic in more detail as it is a very important one to learn and master.

The first money you invest in PPC should be in education and learning the right way to do it. That way you can minimize your learning curve. If you invest your first $100 in learning more about PPC it will pay off in the long run. For Google Adwords you should investigate Perry Marshall. Perry is probably the #1 Google Adwords expert. He offers some e-books and personal training on Google’s Adwords PPC program. His advice can help you find keywords that aren’t being bid on as much. He can help you avoid some of the fraud. In general, the investment you spend in training from Perry will quickly be earned back by not wasting money on ineffective ads.

Hopefully you will heed my advice and not pursue Pay Per Click advertising. It will save you hundreds or thousands of dollars. If you do PPC, remember to set it up in such a way that you and your team are not competing against one another. Set it up so that you can work together and you’ll pay less per click as a result.

I hope you’ve learned a lot today. I know this was a pretty long article! Guess what? I’ve got a lot more to talk to you about next issue!

- Ben Fitts
Send Out Cards Independent Distributor

Popularity: 14% [?]

This article originally appeared in the October issue of the Network Marketing Magazine.

In my article from the July issue of the network marketing magazine I mentioned the 5 lies the experts tell you. One of these lies is that all you have to do to go out and build a big network marketing business is buy some pay per click advertising. Today I’ll go into more detail about why this is a bad idea for your business.

In case you don’t know what Pay Per Click is, let me take a step back and cover the basics. Go to Google and search for the name of your company. Here you’ll see the usual Google listings. At the top there may be a small box in sort of a peach or off white color that has one to three search results in it. Guess what? These are not real results — those are paid advertisements. Also, do you see the search results on the right hand side of the page? Those are all paid advertisements as well.

These are called Pay Per Click advertisements. Google is one of several sites that offer them. Yahoo and MSN offer pay per click advertisements as well. There are dozens of smaller sites like 7search and Kanoodle that are entirely Pay Per Click oriented.

Pay Per Click or PPC is basically an auction system. You bid on how much you are willing to pay for one person to click on your ad. The person who bids the most is the one at the top of the page. The person who bids the second highest amount is next on the page, and so on.

Now we have the first reason why PPC shouldn’t be used in network marketing. The fact that it is an auction system means that the prices for keywords for your company are going to be driven up dramatically by other distributors in your company. It’s going to be hard to be listed at #1 because there are constantly going to be people driving up the price. In fact, when you begin to build a downline, some of your own team members could be bidding against you. You’ll be hurting one another because you’ll be driving the price up so high. If all you had to pay was 10 cents per click it might be worth it. You could get 1,000 clicks for $100 and even the worst web site would hopefully convert some of those into genuine leads for your business. The problem is that many of you would have to pay 1 dollar or more per click just to get your site listed in the top! That price will only get worse as more people join your company and start competing on ads!

So, one reason you should avoid PPC is because the price will become higher and higher. Another reason is that pay per click has a steep learning curve. The problem is that while you are learning to use pay per click ads properly you are wasting money. You can quickly spend $500 or $1000 without getting any results. There is a lot of fraud in the PPC industry, and while you’re figuring out the right keywords and strategies to use you are spending money. Odds are you won’t be sticking with PPC if you spend $1000 without any sign ups.

A third reason you should avoid using PPC is that companies like Google limit the number of times a particular web site can appear in the search results. What does that mean?

It means that if you use your company’s self replicated web site as opposed to an original and unique web site, Google may not list your site. What Google will see is 10 or 20 people all using their company’s self replicated web site and trying to buy Adwords. (Adwords is Google’s name for their PPC ads.) To Google, those sites all look the same. Even if it has your name and your photo on it, 95% of the web site is the same thing. Google is smart enough to know those web sites are all self replicated, , and thinks that makes their web site look cheesy. Imagine that you are searching for something on Google and every other link you click takes you to the same web site. You’d get frustrated with Google pretty quickly and would go search on Yahoo or MSN instead. So Google limits the number of times any particular web site can appear in the search results. To truly use Google’s PPC you’ll want to be promoting a unique web site.

Therefore, I would suggest not using PPC because this is a duplicable business. Anyone you sponsor is going to try and do what you do. They’re going to copy you (and sometimes they should). Even if you learn how to do PPC properly your new team members will have a hard time duplicating you. As I mentioned earlier, if they do duplicate you, you will each be driving up each other’s price per bid. If you succeed in doing PPC and teaching your team to do it, then you’ll hurt yourself more by driving up the price per keyword!

Do you agree? Or do you think I’m crazy? Click on the number of comments beside this post to leave me a comment and let me know how you feel about my post!

Read Part 2 of this article.

- Ben Fitts
The custom card guy

Popularity: 14% [?]

You’ve been lied to. By Benjamin Fitts

Originally Appeared in July 2007 issue of the Network Marketing Magazine.

If I wrote a book on network marketing that’s how I would start it out. Most of you have been fed lies by the “experts” about how to market your business on the internet. They probably didn’t mean to lie to you. In fact, they may not have known any better themselves. In this series of articles I’m going to teach you how to properly market your network marketing business on the internet.

In this series we will discuss free, or very low cost, methods of marketing your business. These methods can, in fact, be very effective. Many of them will take a little work, but even those will be easy to do and, most importantly, will be duplicatable. I will also show you a couple of resources I use to outsource aspects of my internet marketing at amazingly affordable prices.

Let’s start by discussing 5 of the lies you’ve been told. Have you heard any of these before?

1. All you have to do is buy some Google Adwords ads and watch the sign ups come rolling in!

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about - Google Adwords is the special advertising at Google that appears at the very top and right hand side of the search results. It’s called “Pay Per Click” advertising. You can simply “bid” how much you are willing to pay for each person who clicks on your advertisement. If you bid high enough, your ad will appear in the results.

Sounds great, right?

Unfortunately, it isn’t quite what it seems. First of all, and most important to me, is that this is not a duplicatable system. If you teach your downline to do what you do, they will be bidding on the same keywords as you. Since this is an auction system you’ll actually be bidding up each other’s prices and costing each other money. This is the exact opposite of what you want to do! There are some ways to get around this and actually run successful pay per click campaigns. We’ll cover that topic in subsequent articles.

2. All you have to do to make money is use the “self replicated web site” your company gave you.

Have you ever heard someone tell you that all you have to do is throw up some links to your company site and the money will roll in? Never could that be further from the truth! There are certainly some companies that offer self replicated web sites that will work, but often times the company doesn’t really understand internet marketing. Often times, there isn’t a way for you to build a mailing list from the visitors that don’t sign up on the spot. There are some other drawbacks to self replicated web sites as well. Did you know, for example, that in the above example of Google Adwords, they won’t allow multiple people to advertise using the same self replicated web sites? So, if you were advertising your company site you’d have to be the #1 bidder or your ad might not even be shown at all. This means you’d have to pay more money to be seen in Google. That certainly is not something your downline can duplicate!

Self replicated web sites also hurt somewhere else. They hurt you in organic search result listings. “Organic” listings are the natural Google search results, not the paid advertising. In organic results Google actually rates poorly sites with self replicated content because many people have used a trick abusing this to get good rankings at Google. Unfortunately that hurts us network marketers who are using self replicated web sites.

3. All you have to do is throw traffic at a web site. The more people that hit your web site the more people you’ll sign up.

Have you ever done this? Have you ever bought one of those ads where someone says he can get you 250,000 hits to your web site for only $200? Did you even get a single sign up? I know I’m an “expert” but guess what? I’ve tried this stuff too. It never works. The traffic is often fake traffic and usually you don’t get the 250,000 hits you were promised. Not only that but because the traffic isn’t targeted traffic so the visitors you do get are not interested in what you have to offer.

4. All you have to do is build a mailing list and blast out some emails and you’ll get a ton of sign ups.

This could be true if you know what you are doing, but unfortunately most of us were taught the wrong way to do this. For example, do you send out your “newsletter” emails from your personal hotmail account? (Yuck! Most of your mail won’t get delivered and you might even get your email address blacklisted due to spam complaints.)

Maybe you’re more advanced. You think you’re doing it right. You’ve got your own web site and your own blog. Your web hosting company provides you a mailing list server and you use that to send your newsletters… OUCH. Guess what? If you have a decent size mailing list the spam complaints are going to catch up to you and not only is your email address going to be blacklisted but your entire web site could be blacklisted! This means every time your web address or email appears in an email it triggers spam filters! This does happen. It happened to a very good friend of mine.

There are better ways to send out emails and to build your mailing list. These can actually be some of the most effective marketing online… if done right!

5. All you have to do is throw up a few banners on a web site (myspace, ryze, a blog) and you’ll get a ton of sign ups.

Maybe in the 1990’s you could do this, but banner ads are becoming less and less useful. A typical banner gets less than 1% of the people who visit your site to click on it. So let’s say it takes 100 visitors to your web site to get 1 person to click. And let’s say you are sending traffic to your company’s self replicated web page which converts also at 1%. You’d need to send 100 clicks to the site to get one sign up. So that means you need 10,000 visitors to your myspace page so 100 people click on the banners and one person signs up for your company or your product.

These numbers are horrible as I’m sure many of you don’t even get 10,000 visitors in a year much less in a day or a month.

You might be thinking to yourself, “if none of these methods work, then how can I succeed in marketing my business online?” The good news is that there are other effective ways to market your business online and most of them are pretty easy to do, if you are taught the right way to do them.

Next issue I’ll begin talking about how to attract people to you through your online marketing so you don’t have to call leads any more. I’ll also begin sharing some “how to’s” or at least as much as I can fit in a magazine 

Popularity: 10% [?]

Hey,

What do you think about the new design of the blog?

You’ll notice the new logo which some of you helped me pick, and you’ll notice the new Wordpress theme. I think it’s a much cleaner look without all the clutter. It’s also easier to see comments and things like that.

BUT, what do you think? Leave me a comment and let me know what you think about the new look and feel of home business blogs!

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 8% [?]