So I want to talk about leads, because leads are still a mysterious thing for a lot of people that start network marketing, and there’s three things that people want to know: how to generate leads, how to make more money, and what company is the best. So if you’re creating content, remember those three things and you’ll go far.
But I want to talk about how I generated leads for every single year since 2014. So as a marketer, things evolve, you have to a b test different methods and things don’t last forever, you gotta switch it up, you have to try new things. Some things don’t work, some things are great, some things fade away, some things improve over time.
So I’m going to start in chronological order what I did because I didn’t know anything either when I started network marketing in 2014. My sponsor was doing some crazy high tech software stuff and it crashed my computer.
And I was like, you know, I’m just gonna figure this out on my own. And so 2014 I basically started with Twitter, and I tried tweeting on Twitter, like I used to do with my ebooks. So in 2012, I wrote an Ebook, I learned how to share it on social media with just using my Amazon links.
So when I started network marketing in 2014, I decided to just do the same methodology and try to just share my links for my network marketing business on Twitter. I discovered tweets didn’t really work that well, even though I had over 80,000 followers on Twitter, mainly from my ebook and following other authors. It didn’t really pull any leads.
So what I decided to do was see this is the experimenting that I was talking about. You gotta keep tweaking things until you start getting some action. So I tried automating a direct message with my Twitter, and you see those messages all the time, and there’s a way that you can automate it using a software app. I used crowdfire.
I don’t know if it’s still around, but all my new followers would get a new message from me and it was automated. The message said, we’re looking for motivated entrepreneurs who would like to work from home or make extra income from home, click the link. And that link was my landing page to my company. It’s a signup form.
It’s how you generate leads, and I recommend using landing pages because you want the company to email your leads because it takes 7 to 15 emails for someone to finally pull the trigger and sign up so you don’t get that just sharing a customer website. You get that by sharing landing pages and I knew that pretty quick out of the gate, I was like, Alright, I got to generate leads. This is a landing page. I’m going to share this everywhere.
So I followed a lot of people every day on Twitter so I would get lots of new followers that would then get that message. And it started to work. I started getting leads every day, I was getting probably 10 leads a day. So I decided to scale up. That’s the other technique you have to do when something works, you scale it up.
I opened up five other Twitter accounts and followed up to 2000 people a day – it was a very, you know, strenuous time I was following four to five hours a day, just so more people would see my message because you really gotta hustle in the beginning and generate lots of leads to get a sign up.
Now, I’m talking in the cold market, you might have to generate 100 to 200 leads just to get one sign up. So it takes massive numbers. That’s why leaders always tell you to start with your friends and family because the conversion rate is a lot higher than the cold market.
But I love the cold market because there’s millions of strangers out there. And you don’t know what their experience is and you could get a big leader in the cold market.
So, back to Twitter, I got up to about 20 to 30 leads a day with my Twitter, this is 2014 to 2016. Now, while I was doing that on Twitter, I started this YouTube channel. But I wasn’t good at videos yet because I didn’t have any experience. I was just learning from other trainers. So my videos were not authentic because I didn’t have my voice yet. I didn’t have any experience backing my words, I just sounded like them. I was just copying them.
But I started the YouTube channel, and I would put my landing page link under every video. And then I started a blog. Those didn’t take off the first year. So Twitter worked the best in 2014 and 2015 and by 2016 my blog had maybe 200 articles on it.
I started to get leads from around the world with my blog, and a little bit from YouTube, but not a lot. YouTube was still kind of slow. So I wrote a couple articles on my blog. The first one that started to get leads was called the best 4 MLM companies of 2014. So it took like two years for it to start getting leads.
Blogging takes a while for the articles to show up in Google, and you want to get your articles on the first page of Google. That’s what we’re all blogging for, and it’s very hard to do. It’s very competitive.
But I was blogging because that’s what the leaders were doing that I followed, like Randy Gage and Ray Higdon and Eric Worre, they all had huge blogs. So I’m gonna be like, Randy, I’m gonna be like Ray Higdon. And I’m gonna just write every single day.
So around 200 articles, I started getting leads from international markets, and I got a couple signups from Nigeria. I got a team from the Philippines, and this is just from my articles. I left the link to my landing page under every article, just like I left my links under every video and in tweets or the direct message.
The bottom line is getting views to your landing page. Every day, I mean just massive eyeballs on your landing pages, you want to generate leads, that’s the bottom line.
So 2016 was a combination of a little bit of Twitter. But Twitter was fading away in 2016. It wasn’t working as well. People caught on that the direct message was automated, because more people were doing it that way. And so I was, you know, I still followed but not as much so it wasn’t a crazy thing.
My focus was now on blogging, writing articles every day and shooting a video every other day. But most of my leads are now coming from my blog in 2016. Same thing in 2017, Twitter was dying, almost gone. I wasn’t following anymore. I was just writing articles and doing videos.
I was creating content in 2017/2018 and my blog blew up because I wrote some CBD articles, and this was brand new, you know, CBD was just now getting caught on by the mainstream, and I positioned myself very well by writing articles on CBD MLM companies before anyone else.
I started to get massive signups from my blog and I did a couple CBD YouTube videos but YouTube didn’t really understand what CBD was back in 2018 and actually suspended everyone that was doing CBD videos.
So my YouTube was pretty much useless, and those CBD videos were doing great. I was getting 3000 views a day, like I had a couple potential viral videos going and then YouTube was like sorry, suspended and it happened to several people in our company, because of CBD oil, so that was a bummer.
But as an internet marketer, you have to keep going and some things are not going to work. So you just have to, you have to buck up and keep going. Because you have to keep generating leads, you can’t cry about something that gets taken from you. Okay, I got thrown into Facebook Jail like 10 times by this point, booted off of my Twitter several times, and you just get your password and sign back in. But you can’t let these things deter you. These are natural hurdles for internet marketers, you gotta just keep going.
So 2018 was phenomenal. My blog was getting better. One day, I got eight signups from my blog. I didn’t talk to any of these people. And that’s what really got me excited about blogging and attraction marketing, because people found me first. That’s the new paradigm of network marketing prospecting is when people come to you and want to join.
And I got used to that feeling, because maybe 2014, maybe a little 2015, I was trying to call leads, and I was spamming people on Twitter aggressively and it just felt gross. I was posting in hundreds of MLM Facebook groups every day and just being spammy and pushy and salesy, and it felt gross.
So when I finally started to get signups with my blog, it felt amazing because they were already looking for what I was writing about. And eventually my YouTube too, they found me. They’re like, hey, I want to get in this business. Where’s your link? I’m like, here you go. And they’re like, boom, they’re in.
And so I got eight sign ups in one day with my blog in 2018and it was phenomenal. I was recruiting like 50 people a month with just my blog and they were all signing up without talking to me. A couple people would email me questions and I would just answer them. But most of them, I didn’t talk on the phone. I don’t like the phone, and they just signed up.
So I was like, this is it. This is attraction marketing. This is the way network marketing should be. And so that was 2018. But after that my blog slowed down, because more people were writing about it. It was getting more competitive bloggers were writing about CBD. My traffic started to tank on my blog.
Also, I think I wasn’t building links the right way with my blog, backlinks and stuff like that, SEO stuff, and I think Google started to shortchange me with traffic, so I needed a second plan really fast.
So this is still 2018 beginning of 2019. One day, I was like looking at my team, my genealogy team tree, and one guy was really doing great, recruiting a lot of people. His genealogy was perfectly balanced. Left leg was just as big as the right leg. Beautiful symmetry.
And I reached out. I was like, What are you doing? Because a lot of people can’t do blogging like I do. Blogging is really hard. So I had a lot of people on my team that were like, yeah, Erik’s a blogger. I don’t do that.
So, at that point, I had people mainly that were just using Facebook. My leaders were using Facebook except for this one guy. And I was like, What are you doing? So I didn’t have any system to really teach my team. I tried teaching them blogging, and YouTube, but it takes hundreds of videos and hundreds of articles and a lot of people don’t have the patience to do that, or tenacity.
So you need to have a system that your team can implement, and this is when my team really started to take off, because that man said what he was doing, and it was Craigslist. And I was like, no way. I thought Craigslist didn’t accept MLM ads. And he’s like, I’m not posting MLM I’m just posting CBD.
I was like, killer. Can I use it? And he was like, yeah. And I was like, Can I share it with my team? And he’s like, yeah. So that is when I truly started to get a system that people could use. And that was the end of 2018, beginning of 2019.
That’s when I really started to get duplication because before that, I was a big recruiter. I could recruit 20 people a month, but my team really couldn’t do it. If they did, they were doing something besides what I was doing.
So the number one key in network marketing is you want duplication. You want your team doing what you’re doing or whatever is the number one lead generation technique that anyone can do.
Most leaders have a great facebook prospecting technique. I just didn’t like Facebook anymore. Because, you know, they threw me in Facebook Jail too many times. I just didn’t like it. It was spammy or salesy. I don’t like being talked to by random people trying to get me in their business. So I just didn’t want to build my business that way.
So, Craigslist was a godsend for about a year and a half and then people started to get kicked out of gigs, we were posting in gigs, which is the cheaper area in Craigslist. It was only like $3 to $7 an ad on Craigslist. And we’re doing like 20 to 50 to 100 leads a day, several of us on the team and my business volume skyrocketed. My income quadrupled.
It wasn’t just Craigslist. CBD was just a magical product that no one had ever seen before. It wasn’t a man-made MLM product but an actual product that the whole world wanted, not just MLM’ers.
There’s so many different things that blew up my business but Craigslist was it and CBD was it. But people were getting kicked out of gigs. So we had to move over to sales, which is under jobs. But those are $15 to $45 an ad. So that scared a lot of people away. Some people were still doing it. Some people were dropping hundreds of dollars, or even thousands of dollars a month.
And that’s what you gotta do to generate lots of leads. You know, it’s a tax write off. For me, I spent like $8,000 on Craigslist, in 2018, and it was all written off. I reduced my taxes by 50% just with everything I spent on my business.
So I don’t cry about spending money. It’s a business. People reinvest in real businesses all the time they reinvest in their brick and mortar. You know, they spend thousands of dollars on fixing equipment. In the restaurant business, the owners were always replacing refrigerators and walk- ins and lights and cutting boards and dishwashers and they were dropping thousands of dollars, and then they paid a huge water bill and an electric bill.
So if you’re crying about blowing 200 on ads, you shouldn’t be in network marketing. Because I mean, it only cost $200 for your product each month to be a member. Less than that. You could buy one bottle for $69 a month and be a member. 200 bucks on ads is nothing.
So anyways, I’m fine with spending that kind of money and some people on my team are fine with spending that kind of money and they generate 20 to 50 leads a day and that’s what you gotta do. You got to drop lots of money, or you got to start building a brand, start creating content, start attracting people to your articles or your YouTube videos, or do you Craigslist, but that was 2019. All right.
Then I started using a little pay per click. I started using Bing advertising, Bing Ads. It’s the search engine owned by Microsoft. It’s the other search engine besides Google. And I started running ads on there because they’re MLM friendly.
Google I got blocked before I even started. They don’t do CBD for one, so Google was out, I was like, I can’t use Google for CBD, or even Bing you have to use a general MLM ad for being. Okay. And then.
So that was 2019 Craigslist was fading away, and Bing and some content from my blog were the best lead generation sources at that time. Blogging has always been the best because people read my articles. They’re like, I really like Erik, I want to sign up with him. It’s all about building trust.
You have to get people to like you and trust you to join your business and articles or videos are great because they get a sense of who you are, and those are great leads and then Bing, Pay Per Click ads are great because people make the choice to click on your ad – they are interested and you can target audiences that are looking for new MLM opportunities.
You can use keywords like new MLM opportunities, top MLM companies, best network marketing companies, network marketing opportunities, fastest rising MLM companies, if you use keywords like that with your pay per click campaign you will attract people looking for a new business and then they click on it.
That’s the only type of MLM Prospecting I do – they made the decision to click on my links or my ads or read my blog articles or watch my YouTube videos. It’s them. It’s their choice. And that’s the only way people should build their MLM business.
They don’t need to be stalking strangers on Facebook. They don’t need to do anything spammy. They don’t have to call numbers out of the phone book and get hung up all day. They just need to create content, do pay per click advertising and some Craigslist.
So heading into 2020 I’m really a fan of still my blog, and a little YouTube and Google. Now a buddy of mine turned me on to a way to get my landing pages on Google without getting flagged and it’s creating a template website using GoDaddy. I think you can use maybe Wix, you can look up lead pages com but basically, you want a one page website, it’s a signup form. It looks almost like a landing page. And, but it has a website address. Well, so do landing pages, but anyways, it’s basically a signup form, and then they click on the button for on your website and then that goes to your landing page for the company.
So you generate leads that way. You’re basically putting up a wall between the landing page and Google. That wall is your website, your one page website, which you can get at GoDaddy. That’s what my buddy used just a one page GoDaddy template with a signup form.
So you can now generate leads internationally with Google or Bing. Google is cheaper than Bing. I had more luck with the American market. But clicks were about 60 cents a click okay with Bing but here’s the thing with Bing is that the average income of a user of Bing is over $100,000 a year. So they are high end white collar people usually that use Bing search engines.
So if you’re doing your MLM in America, you might have to pay 60 cents a click. But you could get a person that can easily afford your biggest packs in your MLM business. I had a lady buy the 1200 dollar pack in one of my MLM companies, so they just tend to spend more money on Bing.
But with Google, you could get five to 10 cent clicks out of Africa, and Asia. You could probably get 30 cent clicks in America. I haven’t played around with that recently. But Google is definitely cheaper than Bing because Google has a huge, I mean, they dominate the whole entire internet so they have unlimited traffic. Therefore, they can give you cheaper clicks than bing.
Only like 10% of the population. uses bing whereas 90% uses Google. So you can get cheaper clicks from Google, but you have to use that one page website if you’re promoting CBD oil, and you still shouldn’t use a CBD landing page, it should be your generic MLM landing page, the one with just a person on it instead of CBD.
So that has been my complete evolution with lead generation. That’s how it’s grown over the years. The more you do it, the more you’re going to evolve and find what works for you. But don’t ever think that the very first thing you try is going to just be phenomenal. You have to experiment, you have to AB test many different methods and find what works for you and you can’t be afraid to spend money.
It takes money to make money in network marketing. If you don’t have a small Social media following and you don’t want to talk to friends and family, and you don’t really have a blog, and your YouTube is really small, you’re gonna have to pay for leads, you’re gonna have to pay for advertising. There’s no other way else around it.
Getting a couple of your friends in is not going to build a big business. You gotta, you got to really start generating leads. I say 20 leads work your way up to 20 leads a day. But if you’re really kicking butt, I say work your way up to 50 leads a day. The guys who grow on my team the fastest generate over 50 leads a day. They’re not scared to spend money and they’re growing. They’re growing faster getting one guy is getting one to two signups a day and some days he’s generating 70 leads a day.
So you got to go for it really big. Stretch your imagination, stretch your expectations and quadruple your output. And you’ll make it and stay in. And eventually, you’ll have a team helping you grow. So it’s not going to be about just you anymore. It’s going to be hard in the beginning, if you don’t have a team helping you, right, you’re gonna have to recruit most of the people by yourself until you get a few people sticking on your team.
And then they start building their own teams and then the advertising won’t break the bank, because you’ll be getting some income from network marketing. But in the beginning it was very rough. And I didn’t have any money when I started network marketing, so I had to write lots of articles.
But either way, it’s hard work. But ads can get you lots of leads very fast. It’s a great feeling to run a couple ads and get, you know, leads coming in an hour later. So it’s really exciting. And that’s it, guys. I’ll leave a link to my mlm training so you can check that out.
