Hey guys, today I want to talk about what I would do differently if I started network marketing over. I started network marketing January 15 2014. I made a lot of mistakes like everyone. So this article is basically to help you. If you’re doing any of these things, maybe you can refine your marketing, whatever you want to do. I hope this helps.
2014 was a big year in network marketing. A lot of people were turning to social media, to blogs to YouTube content was king. It still is but we’ll talk about that in a little bit. So what I did wrong, number one was I believed in big numbers. I thought that if I followed a lot of people on social media, that it would create a following, and I would become successful. In a way, it kind of worked with Twitter.
I followed a lot of people on Twitter, and why it worked, it wasn’t because of my tweets it was because when I got a new follower, they would get an automated direct message from me. And back in 2014-2015 people weren’t used to direct messages on Twitter, it was still kind of new. Even though Twitter was five years old at that point, or something like that three years, five years, people still believed that I was manually writing a message to them.
And since they’re a brand new follower, they’re more open to hearing what I had to say because they just followed me back. They got the message. And the message was very simple. It was basically like, we’re looking for motivated entrepreneurs who want to Work From Home click the link, and it was to a landing page.
They didn’t know what company it was; it piqued their interest enough for them to sign the form. And that generated me a lead. And they went in and took a free tour.
It’s the same thing today, I’m still in the same type of company that has landing pages connected to an automated email system. And so I was like, if I get more people to my landing page, I’ll get more signups and that philosophy still holds true today. Back then it was a lot easier. So Twitter worked for me. Now I don’t think I really needed to work so much on getting followers. I spent probably a few hours a day following people and then unfollowing the people that hadn’t followed me within a week.
So I was doing this process called churning and it did make me look bigger than I actually was on Twitter. It gave the illusion that I was someone, you know, a brand influencer or a verified Twitter account. You know, with the blue checkmark that only celebrities got but I never got the blue checkmark.
But I’m just saying that, I got up to over 200,000 followers on Twitter, basically just churning every day for a couple of years. And it got to the point where I had like seven Twitter accounts, and I was churning on all of them, just so more people would get that direct message.
And, you know, I got probably 100 signups on Twitter that way. So I did get the numbers game, right. But I spent a lot of time creating an illusion that I was bigger than I was, and I wasn’t forming any relationships with these people. It was all about the numbers, just massive followers, you know, get as many as you can, and none of them knew me.
Now I tried doing the same method on Facebook, and that’s a whole nother story. I got banned. I got thrown into Facebook Jail like a dozen times. People were flagging me as spammy left and right. I tried posting my link in MLM Facebook groups. I actually had a software program back then that would automatically post my whatever I wanted on 1000 MLM groups.
It was like an automated Facebook poster. And it crashed my computer one time and it was just annoying. And you know, I thought I struck gold with this software, and I posted on like 1500 MLM groups every single day. I tried using the same message that I used on Twitter, and it just didn’t work. I think I got one lead. And I was literally posting in 1500 groups every single day. And I got thrown In Facebook Jail like 12 different times and that started my hate relationship with Facebook.
And I was like, you know, there’s a couple other times it was glitchy and I couldn’t create a business page for myself. Oh, then they turned off my ability to boost posts. They shut that off in like 2015. So it’s 2020 and I haven’t been able to boost a post for, you know, five years. So I was just like screw Facebook. And so I just stayed with Twitter.
But the bottom line is, I spent way too much time trying to get a lot of followers without building relationships. I could have done way more, if I spent a little time and maybe, you know, had manually written these people a direct message, and I should have stayed closer to my chat box or whatever, the direct message area, I should have talked to these people manually but I was an introvert. I was a blogger, I was an internet marketer before I started network marketing.
So I wanted to automate my business, and that could be a good thing too. There’s a lot of people that are like, I don’t want to bug friends or family with MLM. I want to just automate this. I want to just do this one hour a day and that was my main thing, let me show you how to automate this and make it really easy. The bottom line was it wasn’t easy. I was spending hours a day just trying to follow people. And I wasn’t building any relationships.
Number two, I was too artsy. Before I started blogging, I was a poet, I wrote a lot of poetry, I looked up to a lot of very enigmatic poets and writers that, you know, spun words differently, with kind of cryptic meanings, you know, abstract writing, surreal writing.
So, I tried doing that with my network marketing business. The first year of blogging all of my titles had no SEO quality whatsoever, my titles were like, how to feel more alive, you know, and so I wasted a lot of time, writing artsy, talking about things not even related to network marketing, and hoping I would get network marketers into my business. So that’s just counter-intuitive, I wasted a couple years doing that.
I created alter egos or false identities, pseudo names because I was a writer. So I started off as Erik Christian, which is my middle name. And you can’t really establish trust with prospects if you’re changing your name. If you’re using a fake profile picture, if you’re, you know, creating brand names that just are hokey, or spammy, like, get rich today, kind of bios.
So I spent a lot of time changing my identity, changing my brand, and nothing really stuck. No one really knew me. They’re like, what is he doing now? You know, I changed my Twitter profile like 20 times and people just couldn’t relate to me because I was constantly trying to be something I wasn’t. I wasn’t authentic. And I was being too artsy. And I didn’t know anything about SEO.
So if you want to do a blog, you want to create titles that people are typing into Google. If you want organic traffic, you have to do SEO, you have to have SEO in mind. You have to use keywords that people are searching, you know, something as simple as MLM Marketing Strategies for beginners. That would get you traffic from people looking for how to do marketing better, and then you could turn them on to your business, you could say, look, the marketing is already done for us in our company, take a free tour, click the link.
But back then I was doing titles like how to get high twice in life. You know, it’s like, what does that mean? How to get high twice in Life?! And when I wrote that, it basically meant that I got high the first time it was Sex, drugs and rock and roll. But then when I got into my 40s, that second high was spirituality, self growth, meditation and connecting with God. That’s what I meant by the title and it had nothing to do with network marketing. And it didn’t get me anything. It didn’t get me any leads because, what the heck does that mean?
So I would have refined my marketing and I would have done SEO right away. Like today some of my biggest articles are MLM review articles, you know, who is the best MLM company in Austria? Because someone would type that in to Google: who is the best MLM company in Australia. So I would get, you know, Austrian leads. Top 10 MLM companies In Australia, you know, and then at the bottom of the review, I would say, click the link and take a free tour into our number one MLM opportunity. If you want leads in Ghana, you know, do a review called the top 10 MLM companies in Ghana. Then at the bottom of the article, say, click the link to take a free tour into our number one MLM opportunity.
And I would have embedded videos into all my articles because when you embed a video into your blog post, it doubles the chances of being seen. Google really likes it and adds more content to your article. It has more metadata. It just has way more and Google likes it.
So the bottom line guys, you’re gonna grow the more content you do. You’re going to grow automatically. So don’t worry if you’re not where I’m at or where someone else is at. They’re just down the learning curve further than you so keep doing it because I deleted the first 200 YouTube videos I did.
I looked back on that and I’m like, I just sound like someone else. I sound like the network marketing trainers that I started learning network marketing about, I sound like Todd Falcone right now. So I deleted all those. And I started to get my own voice, the more I did it. So just keep creating content and you’ll get it.
The third thing I want to talk about is I didn’t have a simple system for my team. When they signed up with me, all I had back then was my blog and a dead YouTube channel. I wasn’t good at blogging, like I said, I was too artsy. And I would just tell my people to blog. I was like, I don’t know, just start creating articles. And I was like, but it might take 200 to 300 articles. And that would turn them off. They would say I don’t even know how to blog and you’re telling me I need 300 articles?? I’ve had many people on my team go, they don’t do it so much today, but back then they’re like, Oh, well, you’re a blogger. I can’t do that.
So the big leaders, they have a very simple system for their team. It’s usually Facebook because everyone’s on Facebook. And it’s a very simple script or a picture that you can post on your Facebook and they tell you how to talk to your people. They’re like, okay, use this script for strangers and use this script for your friends and family. If they decline from the first script, then you give them a second script and you use that. That’s what the big leaders do. They have a simple system.
I didn’t really have a simple system for my team until three years in. One of my guys was using Craigslist and he was just posting. So I was like, how are you generating so many leads? And he’s like, Oh, well, I’m doing a Craigslist ad. And I was like, really can I use it? And it was just perfect timing. I had the right ad and that was right when CBD was getting huge and mainstream was just catching on. And it was a perfect storm and my business skyrocketed.
So just keep at it until you find something that works. And teach it to your team. Teach your team your number one lead generation technique, that is the bottom line.
So basically, to wrap this up, you want to have SEO for your content. You want to create relationships with your people. You don’t want to just follow them and then ignore them. You want to create relationships which I never did because I was an introvert, I was scared of people. I did try it with people and they just quit on me. So I’m like, I’m not gonna spend time with people who quit.
But you got to have a simple system. Okay, so SEO, form relationships, and get a very simple system that a seven year old can do. Because network marketing is all about duplicating a very simple system. They have to be able to do it in Africa, they have to be able to do it in America.
You know, they can create a blog, they can create a YouTube channel, content is still King, but it’s a long term process, but they should do it while they’re prospecting on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest, you know, set up a video for your team, okay, the bottom line is, the leaders are trainers, okay?
They train their team constantly, you have to say the same thing 10 different times, you can’t say you have to do a Facebook post and then walk away from them. You have to show them how to do it. I just like doing YouTube because these videos can rank for many, many years. And Facebook Lives get buried in the feed, you know, you only see them for one day and then they’re gone. If you’re going to do a Facebook Live at least put it on YouTube as well so it stays up for many years. So I hope this helps guys.
