The 21st Century Network Marketer

Welcome to 2008! 

It's gonna be a great year.

This month's edition of "The 21^st Century Network Marketer" is dedicated to my favorite online promotional strategy – Article Marketing.

CONTENTS:

1.  GUEST ARTICLE

Increase Sales By Flying Under Your Prospects' "Radar Defenses"  by Jim Edwards

Internet marketing expert, Jim Edwards, explains why you want to add ARTICLE MARKETING to your arsenal of promotional methods.

2. HOW TO DO IT

What Exactly Is Article Marketing?  by Liz Monte

A basic overview of the nuts-and-bolts stuff.

3. PUBLISHER'S COMMENTS

Network Marketing Success – Taming The Trust Factor  by Liz Monte

Distrust and skepticism create the biggest hurdle facing network marketers today.  How do you get over this roadblock?

GUEST ARTICLE

Jim Edwards is one of the Internet's top marketing and promotion experts.  His extensive list of ebooks includes, "eBook Secrets Exposed," "How to Write and Publish Your Own eBook…in as Little as 7 Days," and his latest, "Niche Advertising Secrets."

This article answers the very important question, "Why Article Marketing?"

Increase Sales By Flying Under Your Prospects' "Radar Defenses"

How do you persuade someone to do what you want them to do?

A whole world of marketing exists around us trying to do that every minute of the day.  Do you even notice it anymore or, like your prospects, have you subconsciously set up a system of "radar defenses" against the daily bombardment of marketing messages?

Take a minute and count up the advertising methods which fight for your attention (and money) every day.  Just the basic list includes:

· Yellow page ads

· Newspaper and magazine ads

· Postcards, catalogs, and direct mail circulars in your "snail mail" box

· Radio pitches interrupting the flow of your favorite songs

· TV ads - about 20 minutes worth per hour now

· Hundreds of storefronts, "mega" malls, and strip malls

· Highway billboards by the thousands

· Circulars hung on your doorknob

· Illegal signs on stop signs and telephone poles

· Legitimate email messages

· Spam email or UCE (unsolicited commercial email)

Just these 11 sources can overwhelm your brain with marketing messages.  Like trapped rats, people develop defenses against this never-ending onslaught.  They throw up a wall or a "radar defense" that goes into action the minute they smell a "pitch" or a sales job.  Don't blame them. We all do it!

So how can you get around this psychological wall against the constant sales and  marketing messages? Well, the answer does NOT lie in hitting people with more frequent and obnoxious advertising or sly, sneaky tactics.  You might get them to trust you for a minute, but it will backfire in the long run. 

You must do two things instead:

1. First, you must establish credibility for yourself and your business as an expert. 

2. Second, you must reduce their fears about doing business with you. 

Doing these two things will get you past their defenses and allow you the opportunity to persuade them to buy your product. 

So how do you accomplish these two "simple" things? What will win someone's attention, raise your credibility, and lower their fear factor all at the same time? The one-word answer really applies to most everyone. 

Trust!

If a seller can get behind your defenses with information which makes you trust them,  then that credibility will carry over into a sale much of the time. 

How can you get this credibility?

Well, take this next fact as online marketing "gospel," for many people have proven its effectiveness. 

Fact: Publishing and promoting with free articles gives you one of the most powerful opportunities available to tip the buyer's credibility scale in your favor. 

How can we prove this works? Quite easily actually.  Take a break from reading this and go check out a newspaper or magazine for a minute. 

Which do you trust more, the ads or the articles? Most people will choose the articles hands down.  Why? Because the articles don't try to "sell" you anything. Instead, they hand out useful information for educational or other practical purposes. 

Most of us grew up in a culture which says we can believe and "trust" what appears in the standard "news" or "information" format.  In other words, if it appears in print, then we can believe and trust the author.

So go ahead! Use this lifetime of conditioning to your advantage in selling your products and services!

Very few things will create an atmosphere of trust and confidence in people as reading one of your articles on a subject that greatly interests them.  It shows you know your business. It also demonstrates you will do more than just try to sell them something. 

Publishing articles literally lets you fly under their advertising "radar defenses." 

So remember these points when deciding whether or not to use articles to promote your business:

1. Few things create as much trust and confidence in the minds of potential customers as reading an article you wrote on a subject which specifically and intensely interests them. 

2. Articles establish credibility quickly because, right or wrong, we've all been trained to trust the "news." 

3. An article, or series of articles, will differentiate you from the competition, who bombard people with nothing but sales messages. 

4. Providing content-rich, non-sales-oriented articles will also help build and solidify your relationship with existing customers so they give you repeat business. 

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Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the co-author of an amazing new ebook, "Turn Words Into Traffic," that will teach you how to use free articles to quickly drive thousands of targeted visitors to your website or affiliate link!

Click Here ==> http://www.turnwordsintotraffic.com

HOW TO DO IT

What Exactly Is Article Marketing?

By Liz Monte

All over the World Wide Web, publishers of ezines and newsletters, not to mention individual website owners, are looking for fresh content. Much of this content comes from folks like yourself who write articles on topics they know well or have researched carefully.

The deal is – you donate your article for free, and they publish it for free. In other words, you get free, highly targeted publicity for your website, and they get fresh content. Everyone wins.

Here are some of the specifics:

1. The article itself should usually be between 500 and 1,000 words, and should be informative, not commercial. Publishers will not accept an article that's just a thinly disguised ad for a product or service.

2. Every time you write an article, you include what's called a "resource box" at the end. This is where you get to promote yourself and your website. The resource box contains a brief description of who you are and what you do, your URL (website address), and gives the reader a reason to click to your website. It's your little commercial message. (You can see examples of resource boxes following each of the articles in this issue.)

3. If someone wants to publish your article to their own website, they must agree to leave your byline and resource box intact and not make any changes to your article.

4. There are dozens of "article submission sites" out there that do nothing but post articles from authors and make them available to publishers and site owners for free. Article submission sites usually get good rankings from the search engines because they are information-rich and are constantly adding new material in the form of articles.  Posting articles to these sites means more high-quality inbound links to your website and higher rankings in the search engines.

5. You can also submit your articles directly to ezines and newsletters. In the beginning, this may take a little digging on your part to find publications suitable to your topic, but the extra effort is well worth it.  I've seen dramatic bumps in traffic to my website every time an ezine or newsletter has published one of my pieces.

6. An output of two to four articles per month is ideal. There are writers out there who throw together several per day, but their stuff looks… well, thrown together.  Quality is more important that quantity.

What do you write about?

This question comes back to that fundamental principle of marketing – give your readers a solution to their problems.

So, start by picking a topic relevant to the theme of your website and decide how that topic could be useful to someone with a particular need.  Elaborate on the problem which your information addresses.  Then go ahead and explain what can be done about it.

If you'll scroll back up and reread Jim Edward's guest article, you'll see that this is exactly what he's done.  He starts with the issue of people nowadays putting up a wall against commercial messages and then goes on to explain how article marketing can lower their defenses.

By the way, Jim Edwards collaborated with his father Dallas Edwards, a seasoned professional copywriter and teacher, to co-author the ebook he mentions in his resource box, "Turn Words Into Traffic." If you want a really useful course in the fundamentals of article marketing, I can attest – this one's good!  They spend the first half of the ebook actually teaching the reader how to craft an effective article and then give a precise step-by-step guide on how to submit it.

Considering the benefits of article marketing (huge) and the costs (free), there are plenty of reasons to jump in and start writing.

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Liz Monte publishes this newsletter and has also authored a mini-course for network marketers who want to reap the benefits of the latest online strategies, "Basic Training: The 21^st Century Approach to Network Marketing."  She has posted it for free on her website. http://www.wisenetworkmarketer.com/basics.html

PUBLISHER'S COMMENTS

This article was published first in the "MLM Woman" ezine, but I think it's very relevant to the overall subject of this issue.

Network Marketing Success – Taming The Trust Factor

By Liz Monte

Trust is becoming a rare, but very valuable commodity in the world today.  Thanks to widely publicized incidents of identity theft, scams and so many other stories of unethical or illegal behavior, many people understandably have their guard up, especially when it comes to interacting with strangers.  Especially strangers who are pitching "business opportunities."  Like, umm… network marketers.

If you've ever worked a cold lead list, you probably spoke with more than one person who already had been flooded with calls from dozens of kooky-sounding, suspicious, get-rich-quick-scheme promoters.  Needless to say, by the time you got them on the line, they were pretty skeptical. 

These are the extreme cases.  Then there are the everyday, run-of-the-mill interactions with family and friends who have written you off as "one of those MLMers" – someone who's always pitching their product or opportunity.  (And in all honesty, in this respect, a lot of network marketers are guilty as charged.  I know I certainly alienated my share of warm market leads in the past.)

Distrust and skepticism create the biggest hurdle facing network marketers today.  How do you get over this roadblock?

Even better, how do you avoid getting in this situation in the first place?

Here is a short, true story that sheds light on this question.

Many years ago, our 10-year-old heat pump died.  Our contractor had installed it when the house was built, and it had come to the end of its useful life.  So I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth, got out the Yellow Pages, and started calling around, looking for the best deal on a replacement. 

Most of the sales people I spoke with just asked me how big the house was and then gave me a price on the same BRAND A our contractor had used. BRAND A was a popular brand – highly advertised – no doubt you've heard of it.

Then I called an outfit called Dave's Heating and AC in Sterling, Virginia. Dave himself happened to answer the phone, and when I explained my problem and asked him for a comparison quote on a new Brand A heat pump, he proceeded to explain to me why he didn't recommend that brand. 

He spent the next fifteen minutes patiently educating me on the intricacies of heat pump mechanics, comparing the features and reliability of BRAND A with the BRAND B he preferred, answering all my questions, and generally impressing me with his expertise and honesty. 

Here was a guy who knew what he was doing! 

At that point, a weight lifted off my shoulders, and I didn't care anymore about the price. I had found someone I wanted to do business with, and that was all that mattered. I bought the heat pump, immediately signed an annual service contract with Dave's Heating and AC, and I've been a loyal customer ever since. 

What was going on here?  What did Dave accomplish in that first phone call that the other companies did not?

First, he gave me a pile of very useful, free, no-strings-attached information that helped me solve a problem.

Second, by doing this, he also established himself as an expert in his field.

Third, he won my trust.

Basically, Dave invested his time in me before I even became his customer. He runs a busy operation, and I'm sure he had plenty of other things he could have done with the fifteen minutes he spent talking to me, but for some reason he chose to teach me about heat pumps instead.  Maybe it was a calculated business decision on his part, or maybe he's just a nice guy.  It doesn't really matter.

So what does the story about Dave have to do with network marketing?

If you want to win your prospects' trust, do what Dave does. Invest in them before you even know them. Freely give something of value that helps solve their problems – useful information.

How do you accomplish this? 

The Internet makes it easy.  If you don't have a website, start one.  You'll need to pick a niche, and this could be any one of a number of topics.  For example, you might provide information about a problem that your products or services help address, or even network marketing itself.  Position yourself as a solutions provider. Make people want to linger at your site and read what you've written simply because it's so useful.  Give them good reasons to trust you.

After a while, they might start contacting you first.

If you already have a website, take a good hard look at it from the point of view of a new visitor.  Is it mostly just a pitch for your products and opportunity, or does it give real, valuable information to your visitors?  Be honest – if you were a visitor, would you be attracted to stay and explore the site further, or would you take one look at it, say, "Uh oh! They're selling something!" and hit the back button.

Don't get me wrong. There is definitely a place for a product and opportunity site in your overall marketing system – AFTER you've built the trust and AFTER your visitor expresses a desire to know more.  But it makes a lousy first introduction. 

Say goodbye to skepticism and distrust forever.  Start investing in your prospects by giving them what they crave – solutions to their problems in the form of free, useful information.

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Liz Monte is the author of a free online course which provides basic training in the latest Internet marketing strategies for network marketers.  If you would like to learn more about taming the trust factor and attracting qualified prospects with your own website, please go to http://www.wisenetworkmarketer.com.