subject: How's Your Internet Business Marketing System Working For You? [print this page] In my experience the marketing system you have in place for your small business of home-based business is the single most important thing to your success!
You must have a marketing system or process for generating serious, qualified prospects for your products or services, and for your business in general.
Your marketing system must attract leads or prospects to you - leads who are serious about and want your products and business opportunity.
Without this it's going to be next to impossible to grow grow your business at a rate that will make the kind of money you're likely looking for from your business.
Beware of the many varieties of "cold call" prospecting or lead generation approaches popular in many small and home-based businesses - hitting up strangers in shopping malls, phoning "opportunity leads" you purchase (which have often already been sold a number of times to other people!) and any form of random contacting people who have not already indicated an interest in what you have to offer.
Let me say it again - There is nothing more important to business internet marketing (whether you're in network marketing or another online business) than having a fully integrated marketing system.
Your marketing system must attract highly qualified leads to you; leads who are excited about your products and opportunity, AND who really want to talk to you!
If you're having to convince them of the value of what you're offering or forcing them to talk with you, you've already lost!
Here's the sad truth. Please pay attention to the next several paragraphs, because they can make or break you.
Very few small businesses and home-based business opportunities have a serious marketing system in place that will drive highly qualified leads to you.
More often than not the mindset is that you've got to either talk to your friends, family, and "center of influence" to get people to buy your products or join you business team, buy business seeking leads from a so-called "Biz Opt" lead source, or simply go out and "beat the bushes" to find prospects and customers.
There are two major problems with this approach to marketing:
1. After you've approached your family, friends, and center of influence that's it! Unless you want to totally alienate them you cannot continue to approach them.
DO NOT listen to the message that "It's simply a matter of time. Just keep talking to them and inviting them to try your products or join your team." This is a sure way to "friend-less-ness" and the situation where even your family won't answer your calls.
2. There are many lead source companies who claim to have "biz opt" leads, supposedly people seeking for work from home opportunities.
If you decide to purchase leads, make sure they are "real time" leads and that you're not getting leads that are several days (or weeks!) old or leads that have been sold to others before.
You also want to know how the leads have been acquired before you buy them. You want leads who are serious about getting started in a home business or who are definitely interested in your product(s), not "incentivized" leads who basically filled out a form in order to get something else for free.
An "attraction marketing system" does the screening for you and brings you leads who want what you have to offer. They call you because they want what you have! My guess is that your company does not have this kind of marketing system. Few small or home businesses do.
MARKETING SYSTEM CHECKLIST
You need to have a marketing system that is totally automated, whether or not the business you choose has one. You need a system that minimally delivers:
* Massive traffic to your website
* Pre-qualification of prospects so you're spending your time ONLY with the most qualified people who are genuinely interested in getting involved in a home business
* Automatic handling of the follow-up process with interested people and it moves them to the next step
* Unlimited auto-responders so you can continue to stay in touch with people (automatically) until they are ready to buy or join
* Customers ability to place orders online, have it automatically shipped to them, AND have the money automatically deposited into your bank account,
*Tracking and reporting ALL activity on your website and ALL results of any advertising campaigns you're running
* Automatic digital download capabilities including such things as eBooks, audio recordings, and videos
WEBSITE CHECKLIST
Of course, it goes without saying, part of your marketing system also includes having YOUR OWN website. This is SO important! You've got to have a piece of "internet real estate" so there is a place people can go to find out about your product or service.
Furthermore, this should NOT be a website put together for you by your company. Your website needs to be uniquely you! Visitors to your site are going to become customers or business partners because of who you are, not because of the company.
A second problem with a company created website is that everyone else in the company has one just like it (with a few tweaks here and there).
From the standpoint of internet marketing, replicated websites are ignored by the search engines. Search engines are looking for fresh, original content. That's not what's on the website you've got from your company.
Now, there's nothing wrong with a replicated website, just don't make it your "landing page". You can link to it later in your marketing process.
Your landing page should be SELLING YOU and your ability to help visitors solve the problem or deal with the questions or issues that brought them to your website in the first place.
