MLM Business Lead System Review

Finding ONE MLM business lead for your network marketing business can be a challenge for many new marketers. The old methods of making a list of friends and family, calling them and inviting them to an in home presentation are so overworked I find that people have a knee jerk “Is This Amway” reaction when I approach them.

Fortunately, we have the internet and finding leads has never been easier. Instead of chasing people, it is now very easy to setup a web 2.0 based social media marketing strategy to attract people to you. But that is only part of the equation.

Too often in our industry, we tend to drive prospects to a company branded page and while these corporate sites are good at providing information, they do not do a good enough job of ’selling’ the business to people.

For my top 5 steps to generate your own fresh leads, visit MLM Business Lead Systems.

Technorati Tags: Home Business, Internet Marketing, network marketing

Work At Home Newbie Guide

Never has there been a better time to work from home. There are more opportunities than ever before – with more and more opportunities opening up in the future. This report will reveal just a few work at home business opportunities.

For someone starting out with the goal of working from home who has no idea where to start, this report gives a great overview of what working at home means.

It provides a good overview of the advantages of working for yourself and the qualities of successful self employed entrepreneurs.

Covering some popular work at home opportunities, it closes with a summary of action steps you should take and provides a list of helpful tools.

For those just starting out, this is a great simple guide that will help point you in the right direction to a starting point.

Get the free report by CLICKING HERE.

Technorati Tags: Home Business, Internet Marketing

Getting Started With Internet Marketing

My method for marketing involves lots of free resources so you can minimize the amount of money you have to spend to get started.  I teach you how and you execute so along the way, using free tools, we both generate wealth.

Not everything in life is free so where I feel it is important that you consider purchasing a tool, I will let you know and in most cases, I do not have a vested interest in the sale of those tools.  In some instances, the paid tool is better than a free version as with some free tools, the creators or authors may be lax in updating or fixing bugs and in these cases, it is worth your time to avoid headaches by paying for the tool.

At a very basic level, I will begin with the steps you need to get yourself started.  Your goal should be at mastering one program or income stream and then expanding into other programs or income streams.  Why?  Because in order to create consistent residual money, you need multiple programs or income streams.  This allows you to spread your risk by not putting all your eggs in one basket.

If a program has hiccups or tanks for any reason, unless you have others you are working it can be a painful experience.  I know as this happened to me when I first started out.  Digging a hole is easy but if you fall in, it’s much harder to climb back out.  So learn from my mistakes and I will help you develop strategies for your own ’safety net’.

One word of caution.  Do not expect out the gate to hit a home run.  Some programs, if things are aligned well and you have laid your groundwork properly, you can knock it out of the park.  If that does happen, do not let yourself become comfortable and lax thinking “wow, that was easy, now I can relax”.  For many programs, it takes consistent effort and persistence to build long term wealth but I will tell you that you will reach a point when it starts snowballing and runs into auto-pilot mode.  This is what everyone should be striving for.  For any venture, you will need to continually tweak and adjust what you do, especially to accommodate the changing climate of the internet landscape.  Stay on top of your game and your chances of succeeding are high.

Here are the basics of what you need to get started:

A program of some kind.  Preferably one that generates high dollar returns but programs with small returns are good too.  Just keep in mind it takes the same amount of effort, time and resources to promote either type.

Resources to get your programs off the ground.  This includes tools, software, ad copy, advertising sources, etc…

Advertising. There are many ways to go here and free stuff works great, especially Web 2.0 social networking which is totally free and a great way to build your ‘brand’ and recognition so that you attract people to you.  Some form of paid advertising is a must and if you have a low budget, that’s fine as you can get a lot done with inexpensive solo-ads and various other vehicles.

Time. This is probably the biggest area people fail to consider when getting started.  During your ramp up phase for any program or income stream, even if it’s a ready to go affiliate marketing program, you have to put in the time.  Nothing runs on autopilot out the gate and even after you have established yourself, there is ongoing maintenance you have to account for which involves some of your time.

For me personally, my time is precious and valuable and everyone has their own perspective on what their time costs to them.  I am raising my daughter alone so for me, it is important that I do not get caught up in unfocused “busy” work that takes away from the time I want to spend with her in helping her grow.   So I look for programs that have an abundance of tools, have a great support team of mentors and will not take up tons of my time on an ongoing, daily basis.

I am at the point now where I work my programs about 4 hours a day.  But I won’t lie to you – there were plenty of weeks and months where I pulled all nighters learning and working on getting things off the ground and the work I put in during this time is what allows me to spend a few hours a day on my income streams.

To start off, you will need to make sure you have some free tools.  Here is what I use and I provide the links where you can download and install them.

Squeeze Page Creator – very simple squeeze page creator

Loaded Squeeze – this is an easy tool to quickly create base squeeze pages which you can easily modify in Kompozer.

http://cantstandmyboss.com/download/loadedsqueeze.rar – you will have to unzip this file and then run it to install on your computer.

UPDATE: For squeeze pages, I now provide tons of free templates to my team members and do not recommend using this tool as it did not work with well with my new Vista machine.

HTML/Website Editor – use this to edit HTML and website pages

Kompozer – in my opinion, the best tool for editing website pages.  Simple to use, easy to understand.

http://kompozer.net/download.php

FTP Program – use this to upload files to your hosting account from your computer

FileZilla – awesome FTP software which is what you will use to upload files to your hosting account.  You can also use the hosting company’s built in file uploader but an FTP program is best.

http://filezilla-project.org/

Zip File Archiver – use this to unzip and zip files

WinRar – my favorite and it’s free to use.  You just have to close the pop up that appears every time you run it but you can also pay to remove that if you want.

http://www.tucows.com/preview/194276

In future posts I will cover ‘how to use these tools’ and provide an overview of my process for choosing  programs to promote.

To Your Success!

-Eddie
aka Loaded Beach Bum

Technorati Tags: Home Business, Internet Marketing

Wake Up Call

Well, it happened. Recently I was forcibly introduced to the realities of internet marketing and making money online in a way that had a profound effect on my perspective and vision on what it is exactly I am trying to accomplish here.

First off, I am by no means an expert or ‘guru’ or a HUGE success in the arena of internet marketing, no where near guys like Mike Filsaime, Frank Kern, Shawn Casey or any of the other top marketers you may have heard of (I do make good money from the few ventures I have started but not enough – YET – to replace my J.O.B but stay with me here) but over the last few months, thanks to people like Andy Jenkins, Brad Fallon, Paul Colligan, Ed Dale, Robert Somerville and many more, I had what I can only call an epiphany of epic proportions.

In order to effectively explain what I mean, I need to take you down a little trip through my experiences to date with internet marketing. To start, like many of you looking to make money online, I was lured into this space initially by the latest and greatest business opportunity spam email message.

I remember my initial altruistic dreams of being my own boss, owning my own business, working only 5-10 hours a week and providing the best life for my family possible. I saw the internet marketing world as the ideal place to leverage my 20+ years of sales and marketing experience in the offline world and, jumping right in feet first, full steam ahead, filled with ambitions and dreams of riches. I clicked on my very first spam marketing message – “Make $3-5k per week on autopilot” and I have to tell you, this was a BIG step for me.

You see, at that point in my career I was working for one of the largest ISPs in the world in sales operations (8 years) and one of the biggest things I learned while there was to absolutely avoid clicking on spam. Reason: a lot of spam messages are intended to ‘trick’ the readers into clicking on links that in many cases invariably lead to installing some kind of software with spyware on your computer. This of course opens you up to the potential threats of scammers, identify thieves and phishers online (there are more out there than you can imagine). So I NEVER opened spam!

So why exactly did I open the email? As I mentioned, I had dreams of making more than I was at my J.O.B., a better life, I was tired of working for someone else, tired of struggling to pay bills and I was in all honesty in a financial crisis so in a sense, I was desperate.

Now, like I said I do make money from my ventures – to this day, that first business opportunity does generate cashflow for me, just not enough – but what happened were two things. First, I found that I LOVE the business of internet marketing – it is exciting, fun and it really is the future of major wealth today. Second, my initial investment of $4000 (product, back end, marketing, etc…) turned into $12000 within the first 90 days. Then $15000, then $18000 – within my first 5 months I had more than tripled the investment in my very first venture and I had no clue what the hell I was doing. Not bad, right? Especially since my child support stopped coming in (yes, I am a man who gets child support – imagine that!).

WRONG! Andy Jenkins says it best in the inaugural issue of The Net Effect and I will paraphrase: Basically, my Vision Mindset is what drove my initial success but I forgot how to actually RUN a business – I ignored the Process Mindset which is the critical piece of running any business. I was full of excitement at making so much money in a short period of time that I became so comfortable (and I believed the autopilot hype) I STOPPED working the business actively and I actually left my job.

I believed the hype that my online business would simply run by itself with little effort on my part and I would just collect the cash. I am sure you can guess what happened next – my income stream DRIED up. Traffic trickled down to zero, sales stopped coming in and the competition within the business I had joined became fierce. It seemed like there were tens of thousands out there promoting the same thing using the same email copy and tactics.

So, very humbly after 6 months with internet marketing I picked up my shattered ego and I went back to work for someone else. Aside from dealing with the depression of failure, I resigned myself to my old reality and gave up.

By now you are probably thinking “I hear you Eddie, I see what you went through but what exactly changed in the last 30 days, what is the wake up call you are talking about?”

The wake up call is this: thanks to some awesome guys (see above), I learned it is actually very easy to get started making money online and it doesn’t have to cost you anything. That’s right – you can make money online absolutely FREE. I know, you’ve heard the hype before but I am not here to sell you anything, I am not here to ask you to give me $997, $197, $97, $47 or any other number you want to think of.

The reality is there are TONS of free tools and resources out there to get you started and maintain your business. The key is to get started, be persistent and never give up. Don’t get me wrong here – there is tremendous value in paying for tools and resources, for eBooks and systems that help your business. Any business, offline or online, requires a steady investment of some kind to stay alive.

The point here is you can easily get started for next to nothing (I will show you where to look) and by learning the right tips, tricks and processes (I will show you where to find them), you can build a successful online business and achieve your dreams and goals.

The very first step is to align yourself with the right mentors. This is the key – no matter what your product, what your strategy or goals may be, if you have the wrong mentors you will go nowhere fast. Plain and simple.

Am I asking you to follow me or listen to what I say? No, because I believe that is an individual choice you have to make about who you want to listen to. However, if you do choose to follow me and want to learn what I have painfully learned, if you want to avoid wasting thousands of dollars on the next greatest thing, I can only promise you this – I will openly share what I have learned, including all of the FREE resources and tools as well as information on exactly how to use them.

So get off that couch, turn off the TV and find your own wake up call. I am here to help. Fair enough? Thanks and until next time!

-Loaded Beach Bum

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Technorati Tags: Home Business, Internet Marketing