MLM Expert Advice

“Time = life;
therefore, waste your time and waste of your life,
or master your time and master your life.”
– Alan Lakein

In order to manage your time effectively you need to know what tasks you actually do and figure out which things are not productive — the Time Suckers.  If you don’t know what are the time suckers they can do more than steal your time, they can affect both your health and that of your business.

I’ve mentioned one time sucker before, procrastination, but here’s a twist on that old demon.  Procrastination isn’t all bad.  How can that be?  Consider this, if you’re facing a task in your MLM business that you tend to procrastinate about doing its an indicator that this is a task that you should consider outsourcing, delegating, or automating. Now if you’re procrastinating on a task that directly generates money then you do have an issue — perhaps your chrematophobic.  Regardless of why you, and your business, suffer from your procrastination, time management will banish it.

Another time sucking demon is perfectionism.  While sometimes perfectionism is a form of procrastination where you keep trying to make something better instead of just using it as is.  Now perfectionism again like procrastination isn’t all bad.  Of course you should put your best foot forward in all aspects of your business but you have to strike a balance.  Work your hardest on those tasks you choose to do and accept that you’ve done your best instead of trying to perfect it… nothing is ever perfect.

Being a “Yes” man is another time sucker.  Yes you have an MLM business which means you are the chief cook and bottle-washer but you can’t do everything and you shouldn’t try to.  If you do you risk burn-out and your health will suffer, as will your happiness and your business. Remember its ok to say NO sometimes.  If you don’t have the time for something and it doesn’t directly affect your business income then feel free to say no.

Now these last three time suckers are related to all tasks of your business but there are some tasks that are in and of themselves time suckers.  For example:

• email
• phone calls
• reading blogs
• social networking
• planning
• learning (about new products, ideas, etc)
• house hold chores
• relationships

Now my wife would say all of these are important as she is a part of my MLM business but I would suggest that house hold chores aren’t quite as important as the rest.  So what do you do about time-sucking, yet important, activities?

1. Prioritize — assign each task a level of importance
2. Schedule — determine when you will do each activity each day, don’t let the task control your time.

If you prioritize and schedule you will turn time-suckers back into tasks to be done.

What are your time suckers?

“A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered the value of life.”
– Charles Darwin

I had planned to go into all the details about how time management can help you:

• make more money
• have happier customers and business members
• be healthier
• have more time
• achieve everything you could have dreamed of and more

I was going to go into all the things that go wrong with you and your business if you don’t have good time management.

However, as John Lennon said:

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.“

At 2 AM this morning my wife was admitted to the emergency room, now I say that not to get your sympathy but rather for you to understand what transpired.  I sent out a few emails and informed the people on my calendar that were part of a  fixed training appointmentsthat due to a family emergency the call would still be at the scheduled time; however I had a special guest who is doing phenomenal in their business who was going to lead the call.  I still got on the call but just briefly to introduce my guest caller.  Unless I had taken the time to plan for this ahead of time I wouldn’t have been able to pull this off.  In my case I knew that there would always be instances that could come up where I couldn’t devote all of my attention to a call but I wanted to make sure that everyone on the call got the maximum benefit so I created a list of stand-by guests.  For today, the first one on my list was available but had they not been I had an extensive list of fallbacks.

I also quickly called two members of my team, leaders in their own right, and asked them to handle follow-up calls on my behalf with a few customers and potential clients.  I felt comfortable doing this because I knew I had grown the leaders in my group to do everything I do.  Again I still got on the call initially to introduce my team members who would be covering for me due to a family emergency; however I also sent out an email to each consumer and potential client before hand letting them know that I wouldn’t be able to take their call personally and while I had someone I trusted and valued to follow-up with them at the scheduled time I would completely understand if they would like to reschedule.  I built up my team members but at the same time acknowledged the trust and rapport that I had already built with my consumers and prospects.

End result all calls were made, everything on my calendar for today was completed, and I spent 18 hours at the hospital with my wife making sure she got the attention of all the doctors and specialists that could be brought to bear on her problem.

If I didn’t have effective time management and plans for “outsourcing” all of my activities along with training my team members to be leaders in their own right, I could not have spent the time with my wife and not lost a single bit of momentum in building my business.

Effective time management allows you to handle what life throws at you no matter how stressful it may be.

P.S. For those of you interested, my wife will be coming home tomorrow and she has recovered from her ordeal.

“It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste time” — Henry Ford

There are only 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year… but why does it always seem like there’s not enough time to get things done.

“Don’t say you don’t have enough time.  You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Louis Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein”
– H. Jackson Brown

How did they do it?  Did they think sleep was overrated?  Of course not, we all need to sleep and we all have the same amount of time available to us… it is what we do with that time that makes the difference.

Do you know how much your time is worth?  I would recommend you do the following calculation:

So if you expect to make $10,000 from your MLM business this year and you allocated 3 hours/day and didn’t work weekends and took a 3 week vacation then:

$10,000/((52-3)weeks * 5 days/week * 3 hours/day)=$13.60/hr

Input your own numbers and see what your hourly rate is.  If your hourly rate is less than what you desire then you need to be working on applying the principles of the law of attraction to increase abundance in your life and you’re probably spending too much time on unprofitable activities.  If you want to increase your hourly rate and live in abundance you need to focus on those tasks that generate income.

“If you want to make good use of your time,
you’ve got to know what’s most important
and then give it all you’ve got”
– Lee Iacocca

Time management is all about being effective at whatever task you are doing and being effective is about getting the most important things done.  In order for you to be successful with your MLM business you need to focus your time on the tasks that generate direct income and increase your hourly rate.  But what about all the tasks that don’t generate income but still need to be done like:

• bookkeeping
• scheduling
• emails
• etc.

Obviously if you are just starting your MLM business you don’t have a lot of funds lying around (at least most of us don’t) so you can’t outsource it and unless you have a large family you can’t delegate it.  You need to consider your hourly rate and decide if the time spent on the task could be done cheaper, if and when you have the income on hand to outsource it.  If yes and your budget allows then outsource, if no then you’ll have to do it yourself for now but as your hourly rate increases and your budget allows revisit the task and see if its outsourcable yet.

To grow your business you need to focus on your strengths and on those tasks that generate income directly… let others take care of the rest.

Previously I discussed how to apply the Law of Attraction to attract abundance to you but their are some additional steps you can take to keep you on track. For example, set some goals, write them down and then set your intention to meet these goals. One of the tools that can help with this is a website I happened to stumble on a few months back that allows you to send an email to your future self.   This is helpful because you can state what life is like having met your goals in the “present” tense and then using the site send that in an email to yourself at a future date by which you intend on achieving the goal.  To take it one step further you can make your email public which tells even more people of your intention.  A great way to hold yourself accountable!

Another tool to use is a dream board.  And yes, it truly is a board full of dreams, your dreams.  I would suggest going out and grabbing some magazines that contain pictures of things you like but perhaps think are beyond your reach at present.  Pictures that reflect your desires.  For example, for me I grabbed several issues of the Robb Report, the global luxury source along with some issues of Dream Homes and Spa Finder and Architectural Digest.  One of the items I placed on an early dream board was a BMW Z3 roadster.  I couldn’t find a picture of one I truly desired so I went to the BMW website, configured the color scheme and options and then printed it on a color printer to put on my dream board.  That vehicle was parked in my garage less than 6 months later.  Note I said “an early dream board” because once you achieve a dream its time to dream bigger.  Whether one of things you want is a car or a house or a boat or a plane or more time for relationships, a family, or even being able to donate to a charity you like etc, find the pictures that relate to your desires.  The best pictures are those that effect you emotionally so that when you look at them you can see, hear, taste, feel them in your mind.  Don’t worry about what it looks like to others… these are your dreams after all.  For those of you who don’t want to cut out pictures and glue them to a board you can create a collage of pictures on your computer and then set it as your wallpaper… a constant reminder of what you are working towards, your intentions.

I have mentioned the importance of documenting everything you do as you build your way to MLM success but there is something else you need to be documenting.  In the previous article I mentioned Joe Vitale’s discovery about being happy for what you have right now.  You need to write down those things you are grateful for today.  Just as your path to success is written in a success journal, those things you are grateful for belong in a gratefulness journal.  Remember the law of attraction “what you focus on, expands” so what better to have expanding than things you are grateful for right now.  By doing that more good will come as the universe aligns things for you. Keep in mind that what you write doesn’t have to be huge it could be something simple:

• I am grateful for the lack of traffic today when I went downtown.
• I am grateful for that fantastic parking spot I found this afternoon.
• I am grateful for another sunny day.
• etc.

The point being that whatever you are grateful for, if you concentrate on it, it will expand and more will come your way.

These tools have another benefit… when your MLM business may not be going as well as you want it to, they will help motivate you by showing you what you are working towards and what you have already that you are grateful for.

Build your dreams for the future and show your gratitude for today.

While most of what I’ve talked about branding, creating an offer, generating targetted traffic from your chosen audience and having a back-end offer but I would suggest to you that if its not duplicatable you aren’t really going to build a successful MLM business.

If you only targeted one specific audience to generate prospects for you can take your duplicatable system and approach other segments of your audience or other audiences altogether.  Also as an MLM leader you know you need to use the power of duplication to maximize your results and the results of others in your organization.

I have been asked how you would ensure that what you have is duplicatable and I would make the following suggestions:

• document everything
• at each step ask yourself “Is this duplicatable?” and if not, change it!
• after you have defined your process, use it again and truly see if it is duplicatable

Duplication is necessary for the longevity of your business.  Markets change for any number of reasons (economy, laws, product availability, etc.) and as a result your audience will too.  This means you need to plan ahead and by having a duplicatable system you will be able to change your targeted audience and survive market changes that are outside of your control.

When time permits I will go into more details on defining your market clearly, crafting your offer, generating traffic, figuring out your back-end and duplication.  For now if you haven’t already done so create your MLM Vision and Mission statements and get started watching the free Attraction Marketing Bootcamp videos I’ve made available for you as they will assist you in all of the steps I have mentioned.

Well if you haven’t seen Soylent Green with Charlton Heston then the title of this article may have you wondering and even if you have seen the movie you’re probably wondering what does this have to do with building my MLM successfully.

For those that haven’t seen it, I apologize for the spoilers.  Soylent Green is set in a bleak future where people are surviving by consuming a foodstuff called Soylent.  Soylent comes in a number of colors but fights break out over Soylent Green because its the only color that is protein.  The Soylent Green chips are essentially made of ground people and Charlton Heston finds out but is then dragged off to be processed in the factory shouting “Soylent Green is PEOPLE!”.

Hopefully I didn’t ruin the movie for those who haven’t seen it yet.

But for those of you that are still reading… what does this have to do with MLM prospecting?

People are individuals, not numbers and not food to be consumed by your prospecting machine.  They will enter their information on your webpage or call and request information in response to your advertising because they like something about you.  They want to hear more from you because of:

• the way you look,
• the way you behave,
• the way you said something, or what you said,
• the education you provided them, or
• the articles you wrote

The point is they appreciate what you have to offer, they trust you and for that reason they request to find out more.

So keeping that in mind, the information you put out needs to be trustworthy.  The way you act needs to build trust as well.  Don’t lie about what you made or how long it took to do it.  Don’t simply regurgitate what someone else might be “selling” unless you’ve verified the truth of it and, I would even suggest, own it yourself and have derived a significant benefit.

Make what you write interesting, educational, but not boring.  I think all of us, regardless of how well we did or didn’t do in school, had a teacher or counsellor who stood out for us because they made learning fun.  Education does need to be informative but it doesn’t need to be boring.  At the same time you’re not trying to be a huckster… give people the truth.  Give them value.

The more people you help, the more money you will make.  So don’t worry about the green, concentrate on the people.

Previously I’ve talked about branding yourself on the internet by showing yourself to be an expert.  In this article I want to talk more about how to show yourself as an expert.

When the Internet was in its infancy or more accurately when the World Wide Web was in its infancy (the WWW started in 1989) all you needed to do was to set up a web page with some links on it for your products or opportunity and people would click on the link and sign up.  According to the NetCraft WebServer Survey for April 2009 there are 231,510,169 sites and growing at close to 6 million/month.  While not all of those sites are active, there is obviously a lot more competition today and you need to stand out.

One of the best ways you can set yourself apart from the competition is by providing your prospects who visit your website with a detailed and complete education on your opportunity or product.  Again, as I have mentioned before, do not attempt to market all your products at one time — at least not on the same website.

For example lets say your product is for those who suffer from dry skin, or skin irritations, then you could provide articles about the causes of dry skin or natural remedies for dry skin or how diet affects dry skin or how your work environment can lead to dry skin, etc.

On the other hand if you are marketing your MLM opportunity on your site, provide articles or a free guide on how to successfully market or present your opportunity, or how to compare your opportunity to others and help people make a decision on which opportunity is best for them.

In other words provide articles that compliment your product or service.  You can do the research yourself and write the articles or hire a personal assistant to do the ressearch and/or write the article at sites like asksunday.com or elance.com.  Regardless of how the content from your site is produced, if it teaches people about your product or service then people will be more inclined to purchase or sign up because you are providing something original.

Your content needs to be different than anyone elses.  Keep in mind that most people are just using some cookie cutter template presenting the same articles that some person wrote rather than writing from a place of knowledge and passion.  Set yourself apart.  Consider what you would want if you were looking for a product that solved the issues your product does or were looking for an opportunity that has the features that yours does.  Also think about why you would consider your site to be representative of an expert and design your site and write accordingly.

Its likely that your prospects may never meet you unless you are just marketing in your own back yard so by presenting the education instead of just trying to push your product or opportunity you are creating and building trust and you’re helping them become informed so that they can make the best decision for them.

If you can truly think like a prospect and answer the questions that a prospect would have you will be seen as an expert.  So write and publish your version of the information on your website.  Don’t just duplicate something someone else wrote.  Your prospects will be thankful for the education presented and perceive you as an expert which in turn will increase the chances of them purchasing or signing up with you rather than your competition.

Release your inner expert!

Well unless you’re James Bond you only live once.  When it comes to your initial success in MLM it only happens once too.  Sure once you have built an MLM business successfully you could move to another company and do it again but it wouldn’t be the same thing.  You wouldn’t make the same mistakes or struggle to optimize your attraction marketing strategy.  Success is a journey and you only make it once.

This means you need to make the effort now to document everything.

Why?

How can you effectively show someone else the steps they need to follow and not only what mistakes you made, but how you identified them as mistakes and how costly they were.  From the start of your MLM business your record of documentation must be complete and thorough. You may question whether or not you should write about how long it took you to personally figure out your why or your first argument with your sponsor or how you missed making the super special Jedi bonus (sorry was watching Star Wars again last night with my wife).  The reason you want to document it all is because while you may think you know why you did something today, you may question them or need to justify them tomorrow.

You need to document not only those things you do directly for your business — advertising, list building, retailing, wholesaling, etc. — but you also need to document all the indirect things you do for your business — personal development, recreation, networking with other successful businesspeople.  In fact I will suggest to you that the latter will prove more important than the former on your journey.

Your business is going to have a long life subject to how you define success and you should have documentation not only on what you do but also what each of the members of your organization are doing as they will contribute to your success.  Obviously you can’t invade their privacy but, for example, when you give someone a task of reading a book you can ask follow up to see if they have read it.  What you will find over time is that those who did what you requested, who duplicated you, will be key leaders in your organization and will contribute greatly to your success.

All financial transactions should be documented. One of the easiest ways to do that is to always use one credit card and one bank account for all your transactions.  Most banks allow you to edit notes online for all transactions so you can add additional details where necessary.  Any subscriptions to newsletters, even the book of stamps you bought to mail out a personal welcome letter or thank you cards, need to be documented.  Small expenses add up and can derail your plans.

Any time you come across a quote in a book that catches your notice, document it and why it caught your interest.  Your appointment books, schedules, and calendars all need to be kept as they add to a complete description of your journey.

When you first start documenting it will be easy to overlook things but if you can document what it took for you to reach each level in your MLM business it will make it all the easier for you to share it with your next member of your organization to help them achieve that level even faster.  While it is all about you, it is multi-level marketing which means there are multiple-levels to your organization and helping them achieve levels faster by learning from your journey will help advance you to your next level and closer to your “success”.

Enjoy the well-documented journey!

The only people who believe that multi-level or network marketing is a selling business are the Lions.  Those who are successful in the business know that if you have to sell someone on joining your business you will have to sell them on doing the business every day (assuming they stay in for more than a day).

There is a “skill” that some in network marketing are told to employ and that is picking up business cards wherever they may be on display and then contacting the individual with a line like “Hi ______, I know you don’t know me but I came across your information recently and you’re the type of sharp individual that I know would be interested in a business I’m expanding in your area.”  I don’t know about you but I have no interest in selling someone anything that they have no interest in, whether its my products or my business.  I don’t like being badgered by anyone nor do I want to badger them.

Network Marketing is not “used car salesman” trying to force his product on you though unfortunately there are those in MLMs that use this approach.   Network Marketing, done right, is actually quite straightforward, we are looking for people who are looking for what we have to offer.  So what we do is present the information to the prospects and if they get involved or buy our products, great, if not, that’s great too.

You don’t need to sell someone on anything.  You just need to sort through your prospects to find those who may want what you have to offer and provide them with sufficient information so that they can decide whether or not your opporunity or product has sufficient value for them to get involved or purchase.

My background is programming, not sales.  I never want to be a salesman and quite honestly the last time I tried sales I was a wreck.  I can’t convince anyone to buy what I’m selling; however I find no problem providing someone with information and let them decide.  This doesn’t mean I go up to people and ask them if they want the information rather I use attraction marketing to communicate only with those that have an interest in what I have to offer.

“Professionals Sort, Amateurs Sell” — Anonymous

So build a prospect list from those who respond to your advertising and don’t waste time trying to convince them of anything.  Build a relationship based on trust and respect with your list members by offering information freely and honestly.  And then market to you list by offering services or products that will help them achieve their goals based on what they have shared with you.  Its about being of service to others.

If you’re ready to become a professional sorter than you owe it to yourself to sign up for the free 7-day boot camp on attraction marketing.

Stop Selling and Start Sorting!