Use Social Media To Market Your MLM Business
Social Media has become an important tool for internet marketers. Have you seen people posting annoying sale pitch and advertisement on Facebook and Myspace? These are examples of people using Social Media inappropriately. However, if used appropriately, social network can help you generate tons of traffic to your MLM website.
Internet marketing guru Perry Belcher describes social media marketing as having a 'Home' and 'Going To Parties'. So what is it all about?
The online world is running in parallel with the real world. Anything that people do in the real world can be done online these days. Social Network Marketing is not about selling, it is more about creating a large social network online and the sales will come natuarally without you having to sell. Active selling can put people off and is a big NO in social network.
Your Home
The first thing you should have in the online world is a HOME. An online home is somewhere you can:
- invite your friends to visit
- have everything about you in it, like photos, favourite books, links, websites
- tell people more about you and what you do for living and for fun
A HOME in the online world comes in the form of a blog or personal website. I am talking about a personal blog and NOT a blog about your business only. Of course you can have a personal blog and a business blog linking to each other.
Where can you get a blog?
There are two types of blog, hosted blog and self-hosting blog. Hosted Blogs, as the name suggests, are hosted by a third party and all you need to do is to open an account, choose a blog name and then start posting. Popular hosted blogs are Wordpress.com and Blogger.com.
If you are familair with web hosting, you can try self-hosted blogs. Basically you need your own webhosting and install the blog software into your hosting space. This is more complicated but allows more customization. My blogs are all self hosted. You can download wordpress blog at www.wordpress.org.
What should I put on my blog?
The answer is everything about you. Imagine it is your home. Visitors or guests should be able to find out everything about you on your blog. You should include:
- photos, basic personal information
- what you do for living - you can have a separate page about your job
- what business are you doing
- what do you do for fun - tell people about your hobbies, family etc
- post anything about you that might be of interest to other people. Eg. a funny experience at work, an interesting book you read, new ideas etc etc.
- holiday pictures if you want to.
From now onwards, whenever you want someone to know more about you, you can send them to your blog. Remember, your blog is your HOME, not your SHOP. Please try to avoid heavy sell pitch or advertisement on it. If a visitor to your blog find it interesting, they will keep reading and find out more about you, including your business.
The Parties
In order to meet new people and make new friends, and to create a social network in the long run, you can not stay at home all the time. You need to go out to meet people, in parties, clubs and various social events. In the online world, the places to meet people are the social networking sites like facebook, myspace, twitter, friendster, YouTube etc. These are places where you chat to people, make friends and have fun!
There are many social networking sites out there but I recommend concentrating on handful of most popular one mentioned above.
What you need to do on these sites are:
- Open a new free account.
- Write some basic information about you and upload a picture
- Search your address book to see if any of your friends are already on the site and add them as online friends. (most site has a function which let you do this easily and the chance is that a lot of your friends are already using the site)
- Search for people with specific interest and add them as friends.
- Join various Interest Groups and interact with people in the groups. Examples are football fans’ clubs, mlm groups, and groups based on various hobbies.
- Visit the site regularly, update you information, post pictures, comment on other people’s pictures and simply interact with other people.
- Keep adding friends all the time.
Things that you should do on these sites are:
- Have fun
- Have an identity and be yourself
- Be complemetary
- Be interested in other people
- Provide useful information or content. For example, if you are good at certain thing, you can give advice, try to help other people and also provide links to useful informative websites.
- Be an expert in what you are doing!
Never, ever do the following:
- Lots of sale pitch (people go to party to have fun, not to listen to sale pitch)
- Spam others with emails about your MLM business
The whole aim of this is to be a likeable person with lots of friends. People will try to find out about you and visit your blog (your home) or website naturally without you asking them to do so.
I hope you find this article useful. This is very basic stuff and if you need more advanced training, you can subscribe to my newsletter at http://www.mlm-leads-pro.com/?t=article.