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When working with ads, unlike buying Internet-generated leads, you won’t really know how many responses you’re going to have to work with in any given week. This is a good reason to include buying a certain number of leads in your ROMs. That way you’ll know that whatever else you have going, you’ll always have some people to call and talk to. After all, the only thing that moves your business forward is talking to more people and doing it on a regular basis!

AFFINITY GROUPS

Yet another great way to find more people to talk with is to look for strangers with whom you already have something in common. Are you an engineer? A quilter? A pilot, nurse, teacher, lawyer, graphic artist, video game designer, classical guitarist, yoga practitioner, fly fisherman, finish carpenter? Whatever profession or avocation you have, there are groups of people with similar interests or professions who will be more open to hearing what you have to say simply because you already have something in common.

Look for mailing lists, local community organizations, and online chat rooms. Some cities sell their voter registration books, which tell you the names, professions, and ages of the people residing at a particular address. There are lots of creative ways to use that information to let people in your community know what you are doing.

Maybe you’re an accountant. You can find other accountants through the yellow pages or an online search engine and send out a postcard mailing.

Perhaps you’re a stay-at-home parent. Many communities have newspapers geared toward families with children. Find some local events and make a point of meeting new people. Listen when they talk. When you hear a problem that might be fixed by more money flowing into the family bank account, offer to get them some information that could help their situation.

MAKING IT WORK FOR YOU

In network marketing, as in any business you want to build, it’s essential to create your game plan, execute that plan, analyze your success, and then adapt your actions based on that analysis. Don’t be afraid to change course if something isn’t working. Don’t stick with something that isn’t working because it’s familiar or because it has worked for other people. Your business takes a long-term commitment and laser-sharp focus on the activities that make you money.

At the end of the day, talking to people is what builds our business.

There are so many ways to connect with new people if you keep your mind

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open and actively pursue these new connections. Each of the different approaches I’ve outlined here requires different personality strengths and styles, as well as different time and financial budgets. Find a few things that you can easily see yourself doing, and maybe one that seems like a stretch. Then test them all to see which work best for you considering the resources available to you. Be flexible, be creative, be methodical, and be persistent— and you’ll be successful!

Amy Posner is the CEO of Leads Lab. Born with an entrepreneurial spirit, she was a partner in three traditional businesses before the age of 35. Introduced to network marketing in 1994, she became a top income earner and created online training systems and audio and print marketing and training materials. Posner has traveled throughout the United States and Canada teaching others how to recruit, train, and inspire network marketing teams and showing people how to achieve their goals.

Network marketing has given her the time, flexibility, and freedom to do the things she enjoys most and has had a positive impact on her life in so many ways. Work is now a more natural part of her life that fits in with everything else she does. Posner now spends her time doing the things that matter most to her: helping other people live their lives this same way is her work. It doesn’t get any better than that!

To learn more about Amy Posner and her leads company, visit www.leadslab.com.

Chapter

28

The 7 Best (and Most Profitable)

Internet Prospecting Tools

Chris Zavadowski

“When all else fails, fresh tactics!”

—John Travolta as Sean Archer in Face/Off (1997)

Let’s face it. Prospecting stinks! Sure, you might be one of those unique bulletproof super-distributors out there, making six figures a month, oblivious to any “no” you hear, and addicted to talking to strangers. If that’s you, congratulations! Skip to the next chapter—because you don’t need my advice.

But if you’re the regular, everyday, hates-to-hear-“no” distributor, just trying to make a few extra grand each month, keep reading. I know there are many more of you in the network marketing world than there are Mr. Top Producer. So these killer methods are for you.

However, two words of caution before we begin:

1.Each network marketing company has its own set of marketing rules and regulations. Make sure you check with your company before going down any marketing avenue that is new for you.

2.Some of these marketing methods might be a little controversial. I can promise you, they all work like gangbusters, but they might not click for you. That’s okay. While each system and method builds on the previous one, you can still use this chapter à la carte. Pick and choose the tactics that work for you and your team.

Let’s begin . . .

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THE MODERN MIRACLE:

PAY-PER-CLICK ADVERTISING

If you’ve never heard of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, hold onto your seat! This is probably one of the greatest tools you can add to your online marketing arsenal to instantly see results. In the past few years, this has become the best way to quickly drive online visitor traffic to your web site for as little as $0.01 per visitor. Imagine, in under 10 minutes, you have laser-targeted prospects and customers pouring into your web site (and buying).

Sound too good to be true? It’s not. If you’ve ever searched at

Yahoo.com and seen the sponsored links up top, or used Google.com and noticed the classified ad–looking links on the right-hand side of the screen, you’ve seen pay-per-click advertising in action.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that the Internet has slowly been moving away from “free” and more toward a “paid” model, right? So why should search engine results be any different? Instead of having to hire a search engine expert to get you ranked high in the results for whatever search terms you want, you can now buy those top rankings.

Here’s how it works: When you set up your account with a PPC search engine, you’ll first pick the keywords you want to bid on. A keyword is the word or phrase you want your ad to appear under when people are typing that word or phrase into the search engine.

Notice, I said bid. The person bidding the most gets the highest ranking. Yes, there will most likely be others online who are aiming for the same keywords as you. But, as long as you’re not targeting broad, generic terms like “MLM,” “home business,” or “network marketing,” and are getting very specific with the terms you choose, you’ll be in much better shape.

You want to use the most laser-targeted, specific keywords you can find. The broad terms will only waste your money. The key is to think of what your ideal prospect is typing into the search engines. What is he searching for? What is the problem she is looking to solve? Those are the keywords you should be bidding on. I recommend www.KeywordMillions.com for brainstorming your massive list of keywords. The site also has a free version you can try out.

Now that you have your keywords chosen, you’ll then give the PPC company the copy or text to use for your ad. Think of this as a highly targeted classified advertisement—you’ve got to say a lot in a small amount of space. Load as many benefits into your ad as you can. For a crash course in writing sales copy, I highly recommend John Caples’ Tested Advertising Methods (Prentice Hall, 1998). You’ll find plenty of helpful examples you can adapt for your PPC efforts.

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Next, you’ll fill in the web site you want people to end up visiting. Be sure to use a tracking link so you can make sure your keywords are actually paying off. (You can use a service like www.PPCAdvertisingManager.com to easily manage this.) That’s what makes this form of advertising so great. If you are not getting a return on your investment, then you can quickly kill off the nonperforming keywords and keep the ones that are making you money or bringing you prospects.

And the last step? Set your daily or monthly spending budget, and set the maximum bids for your keywords. Voilà! You’ve now put your first classified ads online in front of millions of targeted prospects. Keep in mind, depending on which PPC service you’re using, you may have to wait a few days for your ads to be approved and appear. But the wait can be well worth it. And with some services, your ads will appear within just minutes and you will get visitors to your web site within an hour. Exciting! Now that you’ve had a true crash course in this method, here are the top three pay-per-click search engines to start testing, in order of priority:

1.Google’s Adwords (www.Google.com/adwords)

2.Overture (www.Overture.com)

3.FindWhat (www.FindWhat.com)

With literally hundreds of PPC search engines out there, the opportunity to get fresh eyes on your web site is endless (check out www.Pay PerClickSearchEngines.com for a comprehensive listing). If you want to become an overnight expert in pay-per-click advertising, I recommend Perry Marshall’s web site www.DiscoverAdwords.com. It’s an excellent how-to resource that will give you advanced strategies to help you succeed.

By the way, most network marketing companies provide you with a web site. But unfortunately, it’s not always designed to sell. It’s strange how most companies fall down in this department. If that’s so for your company, then you may want to set up a new web site with your own sales materials, getting people to respond in whatever way you prefer—phone, e-mail, fax, online, mail, and so on.

Here’s a bonus tip: If you are tired of telling people to go to your company web site with a long domain, like www.mygreatcompany.com/assoc /554523 and would prefer to send them to a short domain name like www.sallyswealth4u.com, then check out www.GoDaddy.com. You can buy a new domain name for about nine bucks, and then have it forwarded to your long company web site address.