Hi guys,

I just found a new way to promote your blog. A new web site called RSS Hugger just launched. The idea is they will help you find readers for your blog’s rss feed.

One of the cool things about RSS Hugger is it just launched and at the time of this writing only has 188 sites listed. So you can be one of the first guys to get listed and hopefully get a lot more readers than someone who joins a few weeks from now.

Not only that but you can join for free. All you have to do is write a review of RSS Hugger, thereby helping them get more readers, and that in turn helps you get more readers for your blog. It seems to be a real win - win solution. If you don’t want to review their service you can pay $20 to get your site listed.

Pretty cool, and at least worth a try, right?

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 43% [?]

So yesterday I asked about whether or not it is acceptable to have private training calls and message boards only for your network marketing team. (See this post)

So far the responses were split.

Some people feel it’s great because it gives them a competitive advantage over other teams. Other people feel that it is a negative aspect of our industry. They feel all training should be open and publicly available.

So here is my problem. I already have a team of well over 3750 people. If I host a training I can fill up a 150-250 person free conference bridge just from my team. If I opened that training up to everyone I’d end up having members of my team who can’t get on because the conference bridge is full.

So am I supposed to open up a training call to everyone? Or should I foot the bill for a bunch of people who joined someone else in the company?

You see on Monday someone called me arrogant because I wouldn’t give them access to my private team training forum. This is a guy personally sponsored by one of the top 10 distributors in our company. His IMMEDIATE upline includes 4 top 20 people, a distributor of the year, and someone who was twice runner up for distributor of the year.

Should he really need additional training? Shouldn’t he have enough training from the 4 immediate upline who are all top figures in our company? Shouldn’t he try and duplicate what these 4 successful leaders are already doing? Why should he call me “arrogant” for not allowing him access to my “team” training web site?

Am I being irrational?

What do you think?

Click on the little number of comments to the right and let me know what you think about this. Is it ok to offer private trainings or forums for your network marketing team? Should I open up and make my material available to those outside of my team or am I slighting my team (and the fact they paid at least $400 to join) by giving this material away free?

I can’t wait to read your responses.

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 46% [?]

Hi everyone,

Here’s a thought provoking question for you guys.

 Is it wrong to have a private web site or discussion board to share training materials with your network marketing team?  Should we as network marketers make all of our training available to the general public?

I’m curious what you think.  Leave me a comment and let me know if you think it is a good idea or a bad idea and why.

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 35% [?]

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to wish you and your family a happy Thanksgiving!

I just heard that I can offer you a special bonus…

You see I’m a contributor to the Network Marketing Magazine. George
Madiou (the founder) just called me to tell me I can offer you
guys my last article for free! AND you can get 50% off the
cover price of the magazine AND you can get the Masters Series of
audio interviews for free.

How cool is that?

Use this link to check out my latest article and the special offer from the Network Marketing Magazine.

So Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you enjoy the special bonuses!

- Ben

Popularity: 32% [?]

Hi there readers,

I just wanted to offer you a couple of free bonuses today. I know we picked up a ton of new readers in the past few weeks and some of you may not know who the heck I am.
Today I want to share with you a strategy I used successfully when I was starting out in MLM.

I call this ebook “Secret Strategies for Effective Flyer Marketing“.

You might have tried flyers and had poor results. There’s a reason for that. Most people that show you how to do flyers do it the wrong way. They do what I call reactive flyers. Reactive flyers are those flyers that are going to get a negative reaction from people. For example are you plastering a parking lot with flyers? YUCK!

Typical flyer marketing gets less than 1% response rate and half the responses you get are going to be negative. If you’re like me you don’t like that kind of marketing! I hate getting angry phone calls all the time. I prefer to work with people who actually WANT information from me. So how do you do that?

Let’s start by looking at the typical flyer marketing. Your upline gives you a flyer he uses and tells you to go find some big parking lots in your area and pass out tons of flyers.

What happens when you blanket a parking lot with flyers?

1. First of all you don’t get very many responses!





2. Second the calls you do get are typically angry people who don’t want your trash on their car, or worse a business owner who is mad at all the trash in his parking lot.





3. If you do get any calls it’s going to be less than 1 in 100 and probably less than 1 in 300!

So now you’re ready to give up on MLM because your upline told you this would work and you bought a bunch of fancy paper, printed up a bunch of flyers, spent a weekend going to the places like the Mall, and Wal-Mart to place flyers… and all you got was negative phone calls. This MLM thing must not work!

Well the problem is you passed out reactive flyers not proactive flyers!

A proactive flyer requires much less work. You get response rates of 10-30% so you don’t have to put out as many flyers, AND most of the time you put them in authorized places so you don’t get calls from angry people. You only get calls from people genuinely interested in your flyer.

This took me probably 6 months of doing flyers to begin to figure out. I went from sponsoring no one to sponsoring my first 3 people from flyers and more importantly getting a dozen or so customers. This is a strategy I highly recommend to anyone starting out. Why? When you start out you don’t have any money, that’s why you started a home business, right? AND you probably have some extra time you’re willing to put into your business. If you can use this strategy effectively and start to generate some money then you can pay some bills and ease your financial situation at home. Your spouse will be happier about your decision to start a business and you can begin to purchase some additional forms of advertising to grow your business even faster.

So if you want to learn what “proactive” flyers are just download my free ebook. All you need to do is specify an email address in order to download the free ebook. AND if you totally don’t want to give me your email address that’s cool too. Just click on the little link at the bottom of the email optin page. It’s 100% free. I promise.

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 33% [?]

Hello new readers!

In the past few days our readership has jumped due to some of the publicity and links we’ve been getting.

I thought it might be a good idea for me to introduce myself to those of you that might be reading this blog for the first time.

My name is Ben Fitts and I’m a full time network marketer. I’m a distributor in a company just like all of you. This past summer in July 2007 I was able to leave my job and go full time in my business. My business is Send Out Cards and the brand I’ve been building for myself is the custom greeting card guy. In Send Out Cards depending on bonuses and such I’m ranked anywhere from #28 money earner to number 52. That’s out of well over 30,000 distributors.

I am a writer for the Network Marketing Magazine. I also have written several ebooks on network marketing and MLM. Some of these ebooks are from back when I did offline marketing. Now I’m focusing more on online marketing.

I’m not a big time sales guy or “front of the room” speaker. I have done it and I do work hard learning sales and marketing. I even took a couple of telephone sales jobs back in the day to get better at speaking with people on the phone and “selling”. I feel that my real expertise is in training and building systems (like marketing web sites) for my team to use.

One of the areas of expertise I’ve been developing is having leads seek me out instead of having to buy and call leads. I don’t have to worry about the “do not call” registry because I only deal with people that have already expressed interest in my product. I’ve written about this a few times on my blog in the past. It’s called positioning yourself as an expert so that people will come to you.

Many times people are afraid to position themselves as an expert. They’re afraid someone might realize they aren’t an expert.

Balderdash! That’s silly! Here’s the real deal. It’s easy to position yourself as an expert.

If you can make your own web site or blog you’re probably ahead of at least 50% (maybe more!) of the people interested in joining your company.

If you read three books on a topic you know more than 90% of the people out there!

If you write a book (or ebook) you’re ahead of 99% of the people out there! (and you can PAY someone to write one for you!)

These are some simple tasks you can do to position yourself as an expert. And there are other ways too. How about interviewing experts on your topic? Guess what? People begin to associate you with those experts and therefore they begin to see you as an expert.

These are some easy ways you can begin to position yourself as an expert in your topic.

In the next few days I’ll write some articles and go into further details about how you can do this.

Regards,
Ben Fitts
The custom greeting card guy

Popularity: 24% [?]

Hi guys,

If you haven’t seen it yet, Kim Klaver visited our little blog yesterday and replied to the thread we’ve been having about her new startup company. You can read her comments and the comments of others here. It’s always impressive when someone “gets it”. 5 years ago I was doing internet marketing for my MLM and I was having a hard time recommending Kim’s training because at that point she didn’t get it. In the past 5 years she has really embraced internet marketing. Having the savvy to not only have a mailing list, have a blog that automatically posts to her mailing list, and taking the time to visit and participate in other blogs is very cutting edge marketing. Good for you Kim. Thanks for stopping by.

Kim also wrote a response on the topic of hew new company on her blog yesterday. She had some pretty interesting things to say. If you scroll down to the PS you’ll see some of her reply.

If I can quote a bit here without getting into trouble:

From New School Network Marketing Blog

P.S. Confession. After ten years of training and consulting I have finally decided to get back in the field. I’m part owner of a tiny nutritional start up. So I am no longer an unaffiliated “guru” and if that makes a difference for you, there it is. I will be implementing some changes on this blog to reflect this change in my status. Because now all my words will be perceived differently by some.

P.P.S. Over the years of writing this blog, I have reported some of the bad media coverage of various companies, many of whose reps I have worked with for years. I posted those old links in one place recently which caused quite a stir. My goal then and now was always the same: point out practices in the field that make us sitting ducks for media who hates us, and regulators who keep hearing bad things about us. Now of course those comments look evil. I didn’t expect that, stupidly, so I’ll be changing things here.

I think Kim get’s it. I think she understands that now because she has a startup MLM that everything is perceived differently. It’s a paradigm shift for her. She didn’t realize how stuff she wrote a year or more ago might effect how she is perceived today since now she is viewed as the owner of a MLM startup.

Let’s do our part and let this topic die and let Kim take care of business.

I know she’s going to continue to write some killer training materials.

- Ben Fitts

PS. Nelson - thanks for pointing out that the “names” weren’t showing up in the comments. That was a typo in the template.

Popularity: 24% [?]

In the past few days a lot of you have commented on Kim Klaver’s recent promotion of her new MLM company as well as her negative articles on other MLM companies.

But did Kim Klaver do anything wrong?

We’re all in network marketing right? Half of what we do is build relationships with people because what we’re really selling is our expertise. When someone joins our team they usually aren’t joining the company. They are joining us. They think we can show them how to make a successful business so that’s why they join us.

So we’re all in the relationship building business.

Did you know that Big Al has his own network marketing company? John Milton Fogg is also involved in an MLM company.

No one is complaining about Big Al or John Fogg though.

I think the difference is how it is presented. I’ve never heard Big Al slam another company, yet that’s what Kim Klaver has begun doing. She’s writing negative articles about other MLM companies. With John Fogg I bet it’d be hard to even find out what company he is involved in.

Perhaps if Kim Klaver had just promoted her company quietly there wouldn’t be so much fuss over her. After all if all she did was take the nice lady approach to get “disenfranchised” or “disatisfied” networkers, I don’t think we’d be so mad at her. It is the fact that she’s attacking other companies which seems as if she’s doing it in order to promote herself and her company. If she just stuck to building relationships I don’t think she’d have lost so much respect from other people in the industry.

What’s your 2 cents? Do you agree? Did you even know that Big Al has his own company?

- Ben Fitts

PS. Full Disclosure I am of course a network marketing distributor just like you guys… I’m with Send Out Cards

Popularity: 26% [?]

Just last week I mentioned Kim Klaver has been promoting her own MLM company.

Kim Klaver is a well respected MLM trainer. She’s been in the industry for 15 years and has a great reputation.

Unfortunately in the last year she has started her own MLM company and has started advertising for “dissatisfied” networkers to join her in her company. These are people that YOU and I recommended to her because she was a generic MLM trainer. We didn’t have to worry about her targetting our downline. Now that she has her own company she is targetting our downline even if she is doing it in a “nice” way.

Here’s where she got into trouble this week. She’s saying some pretty harsh things about some big network marketing companies.
(post 1 - her initial rant about Nuskin) (post 2 - her follow up). She also had several previous negative posts about: Mannatech, YTB, Freelife, USANA, and Shaklee

I don’t disagree. In fact I agree with some of her opinions of these big MLM companies.

The real problem is when you are starting a company looking for dissatisfied networkers, then you go out and openly attack these other companies… Of course you’re going to rattle some cages and get some people to second guess themselves. Then they become dissatisfied and they join your new little MLM you’re promoting.

Is this acceptable?

To you my loyal reader and fellow networker…

Do you recommend people to Kim Klaver for her training?

Will you still recommend people to her now that you know she has started her own MLM company, AND that she is openly writing about this and promoting this MLM company to her list?

What do you think?

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 30% [?]

What would you do if you were a network marketer…

And you recommended a “generic” MLM trainer to your team. Someone who hosts coaching and teaches all MLMers how to succeed at MLM?

What would you do if that expert went out and launched her own MLM and started recruiting from the list of people you helped her build?

Who am I talking about? Kim Klaver (and link 2) is an awesome network marketing trainer and the author of several good books and cd programs. I’ve recommended her for years and I’m even on her mailing list.

However… She’s now writing about this new network marketing company she started. In fact she now mentions it quite often in her training materials and on her blog. Effectively for years we’ve helped Kim build her mailing list by recommending people to her and now she’s targetting them to join her.

What do you think about this? Would you recommend Kim Klaver in the future knowing that she is starting her own MLM?

Leave me a comment here and let me know what you think.

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 19% [?]