Network Marketing Tips

The late, great American business philosopher, Jim Rohn, was one of the first and best teachers on what it takes to create a successful MLM business (and a successful life for that matter) that I ever had the good fortune to come across. Though I never had the honor of meeting him in person, his writing and the recordings of his seminars have continued to serve me in innumerable ways. Rarely does a day go by that I don’t find a way to apply lessons learned from him.

One of his more basic lessons was on the importance of Strength in Numbers. He taught that it is possible of a network marketer with less skill to produce more than one with more skill. The less skilled person only needs to take more action. For example, if a person was only able to enroll on out of every ten prospects he talked to, he could still enroll more prospects into his business than a person that enrolled one out of every three, simply by talking to enough people. This is pretty straightforward stuff.

In looking at this same scenario, however, what would happen if the less skilled marketer maintained that level of activity while continuing to hone his craft every day? What if he continued to present his business to the same number of prospects while investing time daily for study and for personal development? You’d likely see a gradual, consistent improvement his sponsoring ratios, resulting over time in an incredible growth in his business.

Herein lies the importance of daily study and personal development for the network marketer. One of the most important times of the day is the time you set aside for this. This is one of the small differences in behavior between performers and non-performers that compounds results exponentially. It can be the difference between eking out a meager profit (if any at all) or realizing jaw-dropping success.

Not only can this have a tremendous impact on your bottom line, but it also impacts your ability to serve others. Remember Zig Ziglar’s words, “You can have anything you want as long as you help enough other people get what they want.” The profit we earn through network marketing is directly related to our ability to serve and provide value to others. The more skills you have, and the more value you’re able to provide to the marketplace, the more you will earn. Make personal development and study a daily priority.

Dale Horton is a husband to a beautiful wife, a father to two wonderful children, and has a deep passion for coaching home-based business owners. For more articles on the factors most critical to MLM business success, visit DaleHorton.TV.

In 1979, a study was conducted on graduating MBA students from the Harvard School of business. One of the interesting findings was that only 3% of the graduating class created and maintained a written list of goals. A follow-up survey conducted a decade later illustrated the incredible impact goal setting has on performance. It was found that the 3% of students who had made a habit of clearly defining their goals and writing them down out-performed the other 97% of students financially by a factor of 10. Combined!

If you’re one of the few who already understand the importance of setting crystal clear goals and the impact this has on performance, fantastic. But to really take advantage of the power that laser-like focus on these goals can have, you need to be S.M.A.R.T.

SPECIFIC – Goals should be well-defined. Your description of your goals should be so clear, that anybody else reading them would immediately understand your objective without any further explanation.

MEASURABLE – You must be able to track your goals precisely so that you can consistently measure your performance. It’s not enough to simply state: “I want to be slim.” You must give a exact figure. For example, “I want to lose 25 lbs. in the next 6 months.”

ATTAINABLE – While you want your goals to stretch you to your limits and push you to achieve more than you ever have, you don’t want them to be so far outside of your comfort zone that you don’t really believe that it’s even possible for you to achieve them. You need to base your goals on what you believe your capable of achieving if you were performing at your absolute best.

RELEVANT – You cannot successfully achieve goals that conflict with your core values or your other roles and responsibilities. They must be congruent. Make sure that the goals you set, and the daily actions they require, are in alignment with the rest of your life. If they’re not, you need to make some adjustments to one or the other.

TIME SENSITIVE – You must think and act with a sense of urgency. Deadlines create pressure that will help you to operate with more speed and create momentum. Daily deadlines will help to keep you on track.

Dale Horton is a husband to a terrific wife, a father to two wonderful children, and has a passion for coaching home-based business owners. For more articles on the most critical factors to MLM business success, visit DaleHorton.TV.

Regardless of your innate talent or your current level of expertise, given sufficient time, you can win at almost anything. The key part of that statement is “sufficient time” and the are two parts to this. The first is, of course, any deadlines placed on you that you don’t have control over. The second is your ability to last longer and work more consistently than your competition. The main factor in developing staying power, is life balance.

We all have a finite amount of time, energy, and resources. In order to accomplish a goal in one area of our lives, we often must take away resource from another. For example, more time at the office may mean less time with family, less time for exercise, or less time for rest. Over short periods of time, this may be necessary and even alright, but over long periods it can be damaging, unsustainable and will often actually decrease your ability to succeed.

I burned the candle at both ends for years and years. It turned out that this was just one of a very few mistakes that I was making consistently that stopped me from making any worthwhile progress towards my dreams. I would put a tremendous amount of focus on my business and neglect other areas of my life. I would get less sleep, less exercise, and I would spend less time with friends and family.

The result is that I was always fatigued and frustrated. I could not maintain a high level of focus. I was sacrificing my creativity. I was sick more often. I couldn’t move at as quickly a pace in my work. And my relationships were in serious trouble. So, while I initially justified this lack of balance as being necessary for achieving my goals, it actually held me back. I was never able maintain momentum. And, as is usually the case with lost momentum, it’s not a matter of picking back up where you left off, but rather of starting over completely from the beginning.

Life without balance can cost you your relationships, your health, your business, your spirituality, and your happiness. You need to have balance in all areas of your life. We all have a finite amount of time, energy, and resources and while living a balanced life will limit the resources you can allocate to any one endeavor, in the long-term it is the only way you can acquire and sustain momentum. At the end of the day, you’ll find that you’ve outpaced your competition simply because they were not able to sustain their pace as long as you.

Dale Horton is a husband to a beautiful wife, a father to two amazing children, and has a passion for empowering entrepreneurs. To learn the most powerful factor to the success of your MLM business, Click Here.

I’ve recently been discussing the value of Twitter marketing for building a successful home-based business. Just like all of the social media platforms, Twitter has continued to evolved over the years, and not every change has been for the better. I’d like to share some of my thoughts on Twitter marketing that I hope will be helpful for your business.

1. Be authentic. – If you take a moment to stop and look at the marketers online that are enjoying tremendous, jaw-dropping success, you’ll notice that there is no mold. A significant part of what makes them successful is that they allow their authentic voice to come through, whether they’re a long-haired, shirtless guy that used to live in a van, or a reformed button-down corporate exec from Beverly Hills. Let your unique personality shine through.

2. Be consistent. – Make Twitter marketing a part of your daily routine. You don’t need to spend very much time on it. If you’re using the right tools, you can effectively use Twitter in just minutes per day. It’s not about how much time you put into it so much as that you put in a little bit of time every single day.

3. Be approachable. – Pay attention to the people that are interacting with you on Twitter and make an effort to consistently respond to them. Use Twitter to create a community of your own. Look for birds-of-a-feather and create lists that make interaction with those people easier.

4. Know your ideal marketing avatar. – The single most important question for you to ask yourself before you engage in any marketing activity whatsoever is, “Who is my perfect prospect?” What problems are your prospects facing? What are their most pressing needs? What does your prospect want most? What questions are they asking online in order to find solutions to those problems. Your marketing efforts must take these questions into consideration and be designed to speak to this ideal marketing avatar. Before you can speak to your prospects you need to identify where they are and what they want to talk about.

5. Automation is awesome, but it’s not always effective. – Twitter gives us the opportunity to connect with a lot more people, a lot more quickly. And other tools, like SocialOomph and Tweet Adder, provide us with even more leverage. However, there is a trade off between automation and the opportunity to truly connect with the people in our target markets and, at some point, automation becomes counter-productive. Success in MLM has always been, and always will be, about quality relationships. You need to find the sweet spot for your business between the leverage of automation and relationship development.

6. Learn how to write good sales copy. – Knowing how to write effective sales copy is one of those fundamental cornerstone skills that absolutely every entrepreneur should develop. You don’t need to be a master copywriter, but you do need to be a student of copywriting, and you need to be able to recognized good copy when you see it. If this is a skill that you’re currently lacking, The Copywriter’s Guild is a great place to start.

7. Unlearn how to write good sales copy. – Social media networks have a culture of their own. The rules for applying sales copy to Twitter are slightly different than the rules for writing copy for paid ads. While the principles that make copy work remain the same, the manner in which you deliver the message will need to be slightly different. I recommend that you make sales copy for social media less “salesy” and more like a conversation with a friend.

8. Use sales copy sparingly. – Social media is about being social. Don’t be the marketer that consistently spams everybody with ads. Be sociable and build rapport with your prospects so you can develop relationships with them over time. I recommend limiting your sales copy to no more than ten percent of your content.

9. Drive traffic to a blog. – I’m a firm believer that a blog should be the nerve center of your online marketing efforts. No other tool will allow you to connect with and communicate with your target market so well. Use Twitter to consistently direct the people within your target market to new content that you’ve published on your blog.

10. Drive traffic to Facebook. – It is so much easier to build rapport and develop a relationship when you’re not limited to 140 characters. I recommend using tools like SocialOomph or Tweet Adder to send an automated greeting to new Twitter followers and invite them to connect with you on Facebook, where you can more easily communicate with them.

11. Add value, add value, add value. – Not only will your efforts be more effective if you’re focused on providing value to your target market, but you will also enjoy your business infinitely more if you’re focused on providing value to them rather than extracting value from them.

Advancements in technology over the past decade have been incredible, but a successful MLM business is still built upon quality personal relationships. Tools like Twitter are merely a more efficient means to that end. Don’t rely on them to build your relationships for you or to sell your products or services automatically.

Dale Horton is a husband to a fantastic wife, a father to two amazing children, and has a passion for empowering home-based business owners. To learn the most powerful factor to the success of your MLM business, Click Here.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “If a man hasn’t discovered what’s worth dying for, he isn’t fit to live.”

Human beings are truly unique animals. All other animal behavior is determined by an instinct to move towards pleasure and away from pain. We alone have the ability to choose what things mean to us and, therefore, what is truly painful and what is pleasurable. So what?

Regardless of your experiences, regardless of the challenges you’ve faced, regardless of who abused you, regardless of your poor choices, you can begin anew. Immediately! Each moment is your opportunity to turn it around. Forget about the unpleasant experiences, the small people and the dis-empowering emotions from the past that have shackled you; that have limited your progress and stunted your growth.

Or, if you’ve been blessed in your life, if you’ve experienced success, now is your opportunity to take it to the next level and empower others to do the same.

Every successful man and woman has had a defining moment in their lives when they made a distinct, clear, and absolutely resolute decision to go after their Dream with complete conviction. What does this really mean? The literal definition of the word decide is “to cut off” as in, “to cut off from any other option.”

Make this your turning point. Clearly define what it is that you’re committed to achieving. What gives you the passion and energy to spring out of bed in the morning? If you don’t know, what could give you that kind of excitement for Life?

Don’t play small! You are a child of God! Decide what meaning you want your life to have. Right now! Raise your standards high. Burn the bridges. Accept nothing less than absolute success. Expect more from yourself than any other man or woman could ever expect form you. Do this, and when you lying on your death bed, hopefully many years from you, you will have no regrets. There will be nothing you “should have done.”

Dale Horton is a husband to a fantastic wife, a father to two terrific children, and has a passion for empowering entrepreneurs. To learn the most powerful factor to the success of your MLM business, Click Here.

I recently came across a post on Facebook by a gentleman who has achieved a good deal of success in MLM. He was lamenting about the fact that Twitter is no longer a viable marketing tool. In the past he’d attempted to build his business with it but was disappointed with the results and had come to see Twitter as nothing more than a gaggle of people talking past each other.

While I agree that if you jump into the main Twitter stream at any point in time, you’re likely to see a plethora of marketers shouting “Look at me! Look at me!”, without providing a whole lot of value or interaction, however, you can still use Twitter you build your MLM business successfully.

MLM will always be a relationship business. Technology is incredible for helping to create leverage and facilitate the development of relationships, but it cannot replace one-on-one human interaction. There are almost no network marketers that have been able to recruit successfully using only technology and I’ve yet to meet even one that was able to create any significant duplication. So, as with any tool, Twitter can be useful, but it doesn’t replace the human connection.

One of my favorite techniques is to use a tool called Tweet Adder. It has a number of great features, but one of the best is the ability it gives you to search for Twitter users within your target market and to follow them automatically.

One way to do this is by searching for Twitter users that are following other MLM leaders already. It makes sense that if they are interested in what successful Network Marketers have to say that they will also find DaleHorton.TV to be a useful resource.

Generally, I search for users until I have a list of about 30,000. That sounds like a lot of work, but with Tweet Adder it only takes a couple of minutes to generate the list. Once I’ve compiled the list, I begin to follow those users automatically through Tweet Adder. Each day, I open Tweet Adder and click on a button to start following those users. I follow about between 900 and 1,000 each day.

If you’ve been using Twitter for any length of time, you know that a percentage of users will follow you back as a courtesy. Typically, for me, about 20 percent of the people that I’ve followed, follow me back within a few days. When they do, they receive a message asking them to connect with me on Facebook, where I’m better able to develop a relationship with them. I receive about a dozen of these friend requests each day from people that I’ve connected with on Twitter. These are all folks that are responsive, that are part of my target market, and that tend to be good prospects for my business offerings. Additionally, by connecting with me on Twitter, they begin to receive content that I create to serve them as they build their own businesses.

This is just one way that I’m using Twitter. During the upcoming weeks, I’ll share some more of my strategies that you can use for building your own MLM business.

Dale Horton is a husband to a terrific wife, a father to two terrific children, and has a passion for empowering entrepreneurs. To learn the most powerful factor to the success of your MLM business, Click Here.

Often, when network marketers start their business, they do so at a time when they are balancing a full time job, family, and a host of other commitments.

One great aspect of start a business in the MLM industry is that it is extremely easy begin earning income almost right away. There is, however, a tremendous amount to learn. In fact, in network marketing, the learning never really stops. Add to this the constant stream of business building strategies, techniques, and technologies being promoted by the MLM gurus and it can be difficult to stay focused on the most important tasks.

I’ve written before about the Pareto Principle and it’s impact on our business. One aspect of this success principle is that 80% of our results usually come from just one or two key activities. Our goal is to identify those activities and focus our attention there. Everything else, must be delegate, outsourced, or eliminated.

In regards to Network Marketing, the single-most valuable business building activity is prospecting. I define prospecting as (1) identifying candidates who are either open to a business opportunity or who have a need for the products and services that I sell, (2) sharing the vision of my business with those candidates, and (3) following-up with those candidates as they move through my Prospecting Funnel. This is where fully eighty-percent of your time should be spent. For example, if you’re working on your network marketing business for two hours per day, at least ninety minutes of that time should be focused solely on prospecting.

There is one other activity that should be given priority over even prospecting, however. That is the development of your skill-set and mindset. You should invest some time every day on personal development. This is an extremely important habit, but it’s also one of the first things to get pushed off to the side. It’s an easy habit to maintain, but it is also an easy habit to overlook. So, when network marketers get busy, this is often one of the first items to disappear from the schedule. That is a terrible mistake.

Imagine that one day as you were hiking through the woods, He’s clearly exhausted, breathing heavy, & sweating profusely.you came upon a man toiling away with a large hand saw that he using on a large oak tree.

“Looks like you’ve been working hard at that for some time,” you say.

“Yuh,” the man affirms.

You ask, “How long you been trying to cut down that thing down?”

“I’ve been at it all day. Must be six hours now,” he replies.

“Maybe you should have a seat. Get some rest and sharpen that saw a bit,” you suggest. “I’m sure you’d find things much easier after that.”

“Are you kidding me?” he asks incredulously. “Can’t you see that I’m to busy cutting to stop now?”

Your daily time for study & personal develop is one of the ways in which you sharpen your saw. It’s during this time that you’re learning new strategies and techniques. It’s also during this time that you are forging the character of a leader.

Be sure to give prospecting and personal development the priority they deserve in your schedule.

Dale Horton is a husband to a beautiful wife, a father to two terrific children, and has a passion for empowering home business owners so that they may enjoy the fruits of a thriving business. To learn the most powerful factor to the success of your MLM business, Click Here. Or, for access to the most powerful marketers in the industry, Click Here.

Calvin Coolidge said: “Press on. Nothing can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Eduction alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts; Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

If you were to study the lives of extremely successful men and women, one thing you are likely to notice is the impact that momentum had on their achievements. “The Big Mo” can make an exponential difference in the speed with which you are able to realize your dreams. On the other hand, inconsistency can steal those dreams away.

No matter the level of your innate talent or the amount of experience you have, and no matter how skilled your competition is, with consistent effort, and given enough time, you can be successful at virtually anything. A lack of consistency, however, won’t just slow your progress. It often eliminates progress entirely and requires that you start from the beginning over and over again.

Consider this analogy: You need to draw water from a well with a hand pump. The water table is 25 feet under ground. In order to get the water up the pipe and out into your bucket, you need to crank the hand pump. You start out similar to how most people begin an exciting new endeavor and begin pumping away with vigor. You’re steadfast in your commitment to your goal so you pump, and pump, and pump.

After a couple of minutes, you start to get a bit tired. You know that with each crank of the handle, the water is getting a bit closer to the surface, but your arm is starting to ache. Your pace slows, but just a bit.

Another minute goes by and now your arm is really starting to hurt, but the water has still not reached the spout. You push through the discomfort for another 30 seconds before you decide you need a break. Not a long break. Just enough time to go inside, sit down for a couple of minutes, and check your Facebook account. Not a big deal, right?

Well, what happens to all of the water already in the pipe? It doesn’t wait for your return. It falls right back down the pipe as soon as you stop pumping. Now you have to start right back from the beginning.

Had you endured just a bit longer, the water would have flow out of the spout and right into your waiting bucket. A few drops at first. Then a small trickle. And then a nice, smooth flow of water. And here’s the rub: once the water was flowing steadily, you would not have had to pump nearly as fast or nearly as hard. It would have kept flowing with just a nice, easy, relaxed pace at the pump. But instead, you get to do it all over again.

Your network marketing business is the same. At first, you need to put in quite a bit of effort. But over time, you’ll receive greater and greater returns for that effort. At some point, you’ll hit momentum in your business and then you can ease up on your pace and continue to enjoy the increasing rewards. But this will only happen if you remain consistent. Don’t kill momentum with inconsistency.

Dale Horton is a husband to a amazing wife, a father to two fantastic children, and has a passion for empowering home-based entrepreneurs so that they may enjoy the fruits of a thriving business. To learn the most important factor to the success of your MLM business, Click Here. Or, for access to the most powerful marketers in the industry, Click Here.

Jim Rohn said, “For things to improve, you have to improve. For things to get better, you have to get better. For things to change, you have to change. When you change, everything changes for you.”

It’s often said in Network Marketing that success is simple, but not easy. It’s simple because there are really only three things that must be done consistently to build your MLM business.

First, you must find people that are looking for either an opportunity to earn additional income or who are interested in purchasing the products and services you are marketing. Second, you must present them with the vision of your business. And finally, you must teach your team members to do the same. Simple, right?

Yes. It’s easy to do. It’s also easy to not do.

Like all other animals, by our very nature, human beings are inclined to gravitate towards pleasure and away from pain. So, all things being equal, we tend to follow the path of least resistance, which often results in a whole lot of nothing being done. So, how then are we to create a successful network marketing business?

The answer lies not in know “How?” to build a successful MLM business, but instead in knowing “Why?”

The Why? is what separates us from the other animals. We may move towards pleasure and away from pain like all other animals, but humans alone have the ability to define what things mean to us.

Victor Frankl said, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

If you want to enjoy long-term success in MLM, you must invest time into engineering a powerful, compelling vision for your future. What motivates you? What will cause you to spring out of bed with passion each morning? What gives you the drive to make those extra calls at the end of a long day? To get up a bit earlier? To stay up a bit later? To put off immediate gratification for the thrill of achieving a Great Big Hairy Audacious Goal? What is the legacy that you want to be remembered for?

Don’t leave this stuff up to chance. If you do, you’ll be carried along to wherever the tides go. And you can be sure that they probably won’t take you to a destination you would have chosen for yourself.

Dale Horton is a husband to a beautiful wife, a father to two fabulous children and an ardent entrepreneur, committed to empowering home business owners so that they may enjoy a thriving business. For more articles by Dale, visit DaleHorton.TV. Or, for to access to the top earning marketers in the industry, Click Here.

That late, great John Wooden said, “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”

It’s a blessing that, by nature, I’m attracted to activities that tend toward the unconquerable. By that I mean that I enjoy pursuing things that are never really completed. I think it’s one of the primary reasons I’m attracted to network marketing. Not only does it provide a phenomenal opportunity for almost anybody, regardless of education or work experience, to earn a significant income, but it also provides a tremendous vehicle for personal growth and development.

I’ve yet to meet a truly successful person inside the network marketing industry who seriously claims to have learned it all. I don’t think such a person exists. I say this because even though it is incredibly easy to get started in this industry, there is so much to learn, that you simply couldn’t do it in a single lifetime.

There are a number of challenges in MLM, but one of the big ones is that many of us come into network marketing on a part time basis. We have many other responsibilities and all of them scream for our attention. So, even though we know studying and personal development is important, it’s an easy thing to neglect.

We don’t immediately feel the negative effects of neglecting our daily studies. So, it’s often one of those things that is neglected. This is normal. It’s human nature. And we see it in many other areas of our lives. If the consequences for our choices are not immediate and intense, we tend to gravitate towards the easier path.

For example, even though we know that eating greasy cheeseburgers is not good for us, because the consequences of eating one single cheeseburger are not that significant and not felt until some time down the road, it’s easy for us to overlook them. However, if we would clutch our chest and immediately drop to the ground of a heart attack from eating just one, it would be much easier for us to make the healthy choice.

So it is with our personal development. We don’t see an immediate impact when we become complacent and choose the easier, more entertaining path. Don’t make that mistake. The long-term effects are incredibly serious. It could mean the difference between living the life of your dreams and empowering others to do the same, versus toiling away in a role that is unfulfilling and that does not allow you to tap into the incredible talents you have been given. Make a habit of daily study and personal development.

Dale Horton is a husband to a terrific wife, a father to two fabulous children and a passionate entrepreneur, committed to empowering home business owners so that they may enjoy a thriving business. To read more articles by Dale, go to DaleHorton.TV. Or, for Inner Circle access to the top earning marketers in the industry, Click Here.