HMA HIDDEN MARKETING ASSETS University I N T E R V I E W S E R I E S Can You Really Make Serious Money At The Bottom Of An MLM Pyramid? (While You Work Your Way To The Top) An Interview With MLM Marketing Expert Burke Jones
Dear Student, I m Michael Senoff, founder and CEO of HardToFindSeminars.com. For the last five years, I ve interviewed the world s best business and marketing minds. And along the way, I ve created a successful home-based publishing business all from my two-car garage. When my first child was born, he was very sick, and it was then that I knew I had to have a business that I could operate from home. Now, my challenge is to build the world s largest free resource for online, downloadable audio business interviews. I knew that I needed a site that contained strategies, solutions, and inside information to help you operate more efficiently I ve learned a lot in the last five years, and today I m going to show you the skills that you need to survive. It is my mission, to assist those that are very busy with their careers And to really make my site different from every other audio content site on the web, I have decided to give you access to this information in a downloadable format. Now, let s get going. Michael Senoff Founder & CEO: www.hardtofindseminars.com
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Can You Really Make Serious Money At The Bottom Of An MLM Pyramid? (While You Work Your Way To The Top) An Interview With MLM Marketing Expert Burke Jones When Burke Jones signed onto his first multi-level-marketing system way back when, he quickly discovered that after you go through your initial contact list of friends and family, it s really hard to find anyone else to sign up. Time, money, massive amounts of rejection and all to make the people at the top rich. He decided there had to be a better way, and he found it. So in this audio, you ll hear how Burke works his MLM marketing to make money on every level. He basically does it by combining affiliate marketing with multi-level marketing so he s selling to every lead, even the ones who don t sign onto his MLM team. And all you really need are two things to get started: a landing page and a thank-you page. You ll Also Hear... * The true power of your landing lead-capture page if it s done right and the 3 elements Burke says it has to have in order to be successful * The surprising target market Burke says you should be going after when it comes to MLM leads and the one incentive this group usually needs in order to drop what they re doing and sign on with you * How to make sure all your leads won t disappear if your MLM suddenly goes under * Burke s 3 favorite traffic strategies to get targeted, eager-for-more leads * The keyword trick that will allow you to set your AdWords budget high enough to get your ad shown without breaking your bank (Burke says he only spends about $5-$6 a day on leads but his budget is set for $300) * A quick look at MLM marketing, how to check an MLM s validity, and at what point you ll start to see the real money come in 1
Burke says, when it comes to network marketing, the guy with the biggest team ultimately wins. But Burke can show you how to build that kind of team and make money off affiliate marketing and the power of the Internet while you build it. And in this audio, you ll hear how. Hi, I m Michael Senoff, founder and CEO of HardToFindSeminars.com. For the last five years I ve interviewed the world s best business and marketing minds. Along the way, I ve created a successful publishing business all from home from my two car garage. Now my challenge is to build the world s largest free resource for on-line, downloadable, MP3 audio business interviews. I knew I needed a site that contained strategies, solutions and inside angles to help you live better, to save and make more money, to stay healthier and to get more out of life. I ve learned a lot in the last five years and today I m going to show you the skills you need to survive. This is Kristi Sayles, reporting for Michael Senoff s HardToFindSeminars.com. Kristi: Burke: Kristi: Burke: Hello everybody, this is Kristi Sayles. I m very excited to have Burke Jones as my guest tonight. Hello Burke are you there? I am Kristi. Wonderful. Well tell me your story, let s hear it in your own words. I d love to. Well, I m really going to kind of start before MLM just a little bit because I think it s important. I opened my first website back in, actually it was in October of 2001, right after the 9-11 tragedy that we had in our country. And I opened up a story on the internet selling flashlights of all things. And I found a company that will drop ship these flashlights for me, so we built a website and started selling flashlights. And that was kind of my entry into real e-commerce and actually selling something online. And I went from there into a lot of affiliate ventures. Back then, it was very, very easy to get first page rankings in Google for hundreds of pages, and so, you know, I started promoting a lot of affiliate products over the next couple of years, and did really, really well with that but, you know, over time, Google got smarter. And it just got harder and harder to easily get ranked in Google. And so, you know, it felt like I was just constantly chasing the next SEO trick, or whatever you want to call it, and I just really kind of grew tired of 2
that. And so that s when I started kind of thinking about other things, and I had a friend that was involved in a network marketing company and she kept calling me saying, You know, I really think you could do really in this company with me, and I wish you would take a look at it. And here is a story about the power of persistence. Because for about a year, every other month or so, she would call me. And then finally one night I said, Okay. I ll go with you. And she took me to a meeting and this is what had tied me into this was that the guy that was going to be given this presentation had built his business using the internet. That s what got me there. So I went to a hotel meeting, and if you re involved in network marketing, I m sure you re familiar with what hotel meetings are, but basically the team rents a room, there is lots of hyped up music and it s this big sales presentation. It s a real emotional driven presentation to get new people to sign up. And so, I went that night and I listen to this guy give his talk about how he had used the internet to build his business, and learned all about the business, and thought you know, this sounds great. I know how to use the internet and I can do what he does. So I got signed up with her, and I didn t really want to go around to bug my friends and family and everything, so immediately I hooked up with this system this guy was using to supposedly use the internet to build his business. Well, what I found out was, this is what the system consisted of, it was basically a contact manager, and they would purchase leads from lead companies and then basically use the internet just to give presentations and to manage their contacts, these leads that they had purchased. So I did it, I mean, I bought leads, I cold called hundreds of people. People got mad at me, they lead you on because they don t want to tell you no so they well, I ll look at it, call me back in two nights. So then you call them back in two nights, they re not home or they haven t looked at it. You re spending two, three, four, five, six bucks a lead every time they say no. And what I found is, I mean, almost every network marketing company you talk to, once you talk to all of your friends and family, and kind of your list of 100 or whatever your company calls it, this is the next thing they ll tell you to do. 3
And it creates a lot of leverage for the people above you, okay? If they have 100 people out there buying leads and cold calling them on their team, you will sponsor people that way, it takes a long time to get good at it and it takes a lot of money to get good at it, and the duplication is just very hard to make happen. And that was my biggest fear was when I finally did sponsor somebody, are they going to have the stomach to live through what I lived through? I mean, massive amounts of rejection, spending lots of money, spending tons of time, and just not getting results very quickly. You know, I finally did sponsor somebody, and basically I sponsored her and then I never talked to her again because she wouldn t answer my phone calls and she never called me. So she just kind of went missing in action, and that s really when I stepped back and said, There has just got to be a better way to do this business. Here it is in a nutshell what we re going to talk about is combining the power of the internet with affiliate marketing and network marketing. That s my story in a nutshell, kind of the short version of it. So that s what I did, I started generated my own leads, figuring out ways to profit on those leads whether they ever joined my primary business opportunity or not. Kristi: Burke: How do you do that? Because you make that sound simple but we don t know how to do that. I m not going to get really technical because it gets hard to do really technical things on the phone. Here s what you can do. Essentially, you need to create a lead capture page, or a squeeze page, and what this kind of page is, in real basic terms, is a page that has some sort of a headline on it, that catches the visitor s eye, some bullet points explain what you re going to tell them, and then an opt in box when they enter their name and email address. So you drive traffic to that page, and then people opt in. And then what you do, this is where the network part of network marketing comes in, is that you build a relationship with that person through email so that they come to know that I can trust you. The power of that is that you can build a relationship with thousands of people at the same time, and not have to be dialing the phone a hundred times a night to do that. 4
Using an auto responder system like AWeber, Get Response, that when people opt into your site, they then go on your email list. And it s really the core of your business. For what I m going to tell you here, I mean you re only going to be talking about maybe 20 to 40 bucks a month for your core system, to put your system in place. And you re going to need webhosting, where you can upload a simple two page website, and when I say a two page website it s the landing page and it s the thank you page. That s all you need to get started. You don t need your own website to get started, but if you really want to benefit to the greatest extent, it will help to have your own website. Now, you know when I say your own website, I m not talking about your company s website that they give you. When you join a company, a lot of times they ll have a website that you can kind of brand as your own like maybe your name is on there, but it s still a company provided website. It s just never smart to drive traffic to that website. Here s the reason. In my business, I like to control as much of it as I can. And what that means to me is I can t control whether my network marketing company will be around tomorrow. I can t control if they ll change their policies tomorrow, or change their compensation plan, or simply just go out of business. I mean, it happens every day and we all think it won t happen to our company but it does. It happens to a lot of companies for one reason or another. So if you ve setup of all of your traffic streams, and you sent all of your leads just straight to the company website. You don t have any assets there. If the company disappears, so do all of your leads and so all of your subscribers. So what I like to do is I like to generate my own leads into my own database, where I have a lot more control over what happens to that lead. For the long term, if tomorrow the company I m with goes out of business, well I still have my whole database of leads and I can just easily start promoting a different company the next day. Kristi: Burke: With this same target market, [accusing 0:08:04] your target market that important? Yeah, let s talk about the target market. And I m going to talk about the target market as it relates to leads for your business, not for customer 5
leads, I m not talking about leads as far as generating leads of people that would want to join your business with you. Most of us are taught to market our network marketing businesses is to go to friends and family. That s the first line. I mean, I haven t seen a company out there that doesn t say to do that right off the bat. And the reason they say that is because it does work, if you can withstand the rejection, you re going to get a few people to join you. And a lot of those people may not even have a passion for starting their own business, maybe they just wanted to make you feel better, or you kind of talked them into it, or something like that. And then the other kind of lead is people that are out there just looking for a business opportunity. So if you go buy leads, there is all kinds of lead sources on the internet, where you can go and plop down your cash and they ll give you so many leads. Those leads are people who have filled out a form somewhere on the internet, that all they agree to was that I am interested in a home based business. That s it. Some of them have filled out that form because they truly are interested in a home based business. Some of them have filled out that form because they wanted to get a free ipod. They were offered an incentive to fill out that form. So with all of those kinds of leads, you have to overcome a lot of the typical rejects we face as network marketers. Like, is this illegal? Is this one of those crazy pyramid schemes? All of those kind of rejection issues, you ve got to overcome just as you hope to sponsor this person into your business. And that s what I used to do. And that s the market that I chased originally. What I found out was that the real target market that you want to go after in your network marketing business is other people that are already involved in network marketing. Now, before everybody looks at me like I m a total crazed lunatic, I m going to explain a little bit. People join you in your business because there is one of two reasons. You either have a system in place that they can see themselves plugging into, and they will join your business because of that system, or they know, like and trust you. So by using the internet, you can generate leads from this target market very, very easily. And show them a system that you re using or you know, over time build a relationship through email with them where they will join you. 6
Trust me, people are loyal to their business for so long until they can see something better and they will leave their existing company and join your business. Now, there is another reason that generating leads of people that are already involved in network marketing is a great idea. They believe in the business structure already. They believe in the power of network marketing, so you don t have to overcome that. They also show that they are willing to spend money. So even if they never join your network marketing opportunity, you can still make money from those leads by offering other network marketing related training courses. You know, there is just tons of different products you can offer them as an affiliate that when they purchase you make a commission. Here s the power of this. I ve had two people this week join my business with me that I ve never spoken to on the phone and they ve never emailed me. They just signed up. Now they were already in another network marketing business, but through the power of attraction marketing, just putting myself out there and showing them my system, they come on board. That s why your target market is so important because that s how you re going to make money whether they join you in your business or not. And making money, it s the core of having a business. I mean, if you re not making money you really don t have a business. You have a hobby. I fly radio control airplanes and I mean that s a hobby. I spend a lot of money on it, but that s not a business. So you have to find a way to make money, and in network marketing, a lot of times you just don t make a ton of money when that person first joins your business. If you sponsor someone in the organization, it varies from company to company but I would say on average maybe you d make 100 to 300 bucks like that month. And then you would make a little bit off of them every month, but it takes a long time to build a team big enough that you re making a nice residual income check month in and month out. You re listening to an interview on Michael Senoff s HardToFindSeminars.com. Burke: In fact, it takes a long time for a lot of people just to make enough to cover their monthly expenses to keep their business active. So using the strategies that I m talking about here, I know we re talking in generalities, 7
combing the right target market with network working and affiliate marketing, it s very easy for people to be put into a position where they have a positive cash flow, where they are making money every month to cover their monthly business expenses and also have some money left over to do more advertising or take their spouse or significant other out to dinner. That s kind of it in a nutshell why your target market is important because that s how you re going to make money on the frontend and also how you re going to stay around long enough to really enjoy success in your network marketing organization. Kristi: One thing that I want to know is about your traffic strategies. Everybody wants to know because we can have the greatest squeeze page, we can have whatever is fine, but if we can t get eyeballs to that site, we re dead in the water. So tell us how you get traffic to your website. Burke: One thing that I want to mention right off the bat is, it doesn t take a significant amount of opt ins, or people joining your mailing list to really have a huge impact on your business. With the right traffic, if you re generating five or ten leads a day, you will be shocked at what can end up happening in your business in a very short period of time, because you can monetize those leads and then present your business opportunity to them over time. So when we talk about traffic, don t think that you re going to go out there and get a thousand visitors a day right off the bat. And you don t really have to as long as you re generating the right targeted traffic. And I use a lot of different methods of traffic generation. I have let s say half a dozen different techniques that I use that I ll drive a little bit a traffic and generate a few subscribers a day. And that s really the best way to do it over time. What I recommend to people when they first get started, is just choose one strategy, get good at it, focus on it for a few weeks until you are driving some traffic, and then learn another one because what I see people do is they go out there and they try to do six things at one time, and they just get totally overwhelmed. So I m going to give you a few of my favorite ones tonight, and then if you haven t done one of them before, pick one and get started. Right off the bat, my favorite strategy is article marketing and probably a lot of people 8
have heard of article marketing, and may be afraid of giving it a stab. But it s really very simple. And all you have to do is just wright articles, and they don t have to be long. The majority of my articles are like 300 words. They are long enough to get accepted in major article distribution directories, but they don t have to be really long. You just have to put yourself out there because that s what people are connecting with, is they re connecting with the voice of that article and the person behind that article. So here is the question I get, Well, I haven t had any success. What am I supposed to write about? You know how to do the internet, you re generating all of these leads and it s easy for you to write articles. It s actually very simple for anybody. If you have no success, than write an article about your failures. Write an article about how you spent hundreds or thousands of dollars buying leads, and never saw any success and that s why you ve turned the internet to generate your own leads. Simple as that. When I first turned to the internet, I had zero people on my team. And I did exactly that strategy. And here s the thing guys, people will call you. They will email you. And nobody ever asked me, Well how much money are you making? Or How many people do you have on your team? [End of transcript. Timestamp 0:16:04] 9