I knew a guy that owned a vacant house once, and he always laughed at the amount of postcards he received every week. He said they all looked the same and he just threw them away. That got me to thinking about my own marketing and I quickly realized that my plain white post cards were probably meeting the same fate as those that he received every week. The owners of vacant houses are constantly inundated with a storm of postcards, so in order for yours to get noticed, you have to stick out a little.

The first mistake in direct marketing that many newbies make is that they send only one card to a home owner and get frustrated when they don’t get a response. The successful marketers understand that it takes more than one contact to get a home owner’s attention. In fact, on average it takes a minimum of THREE contacts to get noticed. If you think about the big corporations like McDonalds, you will realize that they run ads constantly and repetitively on the television. You’ll be watching football one Sunday and by the end of the game, you suddenly have a yearning for a Big Mac, even if you don’t like them. That is because McDonalds ran ads over and over again in order to stand out in the white noise of all the marketing that you are consuming during the course of the game. They are trying to achieve what marketers call top of mind awareness. That is your goal with your direct marketing. You want to make sure that after they have received multiple pieces of your marketing and they decide to sell, your company is the first one they think of because of all the mail they have received from you.

Another thing you might want to consider in your post cards is using a color that will stand out more than everybody else. For that reason, use cards that are fluorescent instead of plain colors. Those colors are brighter and tend to get noticed better. A good example is to look at the colors that Sprint uses on their store signs–fluorescent yellow. The reason they use that color is that it catches people’s attention more than soft, normal colors.

One thing that you don’t want to forget is that letters work better than postcards. Not just any letter, but those that are hand-addressed. Why is that? Because it doesn’t look like just another piece of junk mail. Instead, it appears to be a letter from somebody they know. Rapport from an envelope. You can’t beat that.

When you go to write your marketing letters you can go one of two ways. You might want to keep your letter short and sweet. I, however, have had the best of luck with a three page letter that I include in my manual, The Hidden Treasures and Profits of Probate. The reason it works so well is that when I wrote that letter, put in to action the advise of Zig Ziglar. Give enough people what they want and you will get what they want. What I did in the letter is give them a short rehab course explaining to them everything they would need to do from demo and construction to selling the house. The catch is at the end when I close them by telling them that I will buy their house in its current condition. By the time they get through reading my letter, they realize that there is a lot of time, money and energy required to fix up a house in order to get full retail value. But the real reason the letter works so well is that the executor has the real feeling that I want to help them, not take advantage of them.

The Bible is a great moral book, but it is also an awesome business manual. If you will remember to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, you will have great success in your marketing.

One direct mail technique you should adapt to your MLM business is the “stick” letter. In direct mail, this letter would go out as soon as the sale was made, before the product shipment. It will become one of your most important network marketing tools.

The letter’s job was to make the sale stick. In MLM recruiting, of course, you get a high number of new reps with “buyer’s remorse.” They may or may not wish they hadn’t joined, but they sure don’t do any work.

This happens because in network marketing, you run into two types of prospect:

1. Those who are very self-motivated to join your opportunity and make it a success.

2. Those who aren’t really self-motivated … but they get in your process, maybe in your email follow-ups, and they just start moving along. Somewhere along the way, they get convinced to join. These new sign-ups are much more likely to fall off your group wagon than the very self-motivated ones.

You may well have a great opportunity for them. But they still don’t lift a finger to build themselves a lifetime income.

Why?

It could be that you moved them along a bit faster than they were comfortable with … and when they joined your company, they were still in a state of agitation. Which means “instant buyer’s remorse.”

Or – even if they are committed, even if they really want to be part of your team and what you are doing … just a short time ago, maybe just days or even hours – they didn’t even know you existed.

That desire to be a part of your team wasn’t there at all.

But they read your article or they got on your conference call and they talked with you and that desire went from non-existent to a very high level very quickly. And so now they’re excited and they’ve spent money and they’ve committed their time to a whole new adventure that they didn’t even know existed just a very short time ago.

Then as they sit alone and think about this, some will get that feeling of buyer’s remorse: “Am I doing the right thing?” Maybe they’ll notice they have 10 emails from 10 other money-making opportunities. “What makes this MLM deal any better for me than all of those others?” Without even doing anything, they’ll decide your opportunity is not the place for them.

That’s why part of your job is to inoculate yourself against buyer’s remorse.

Direct mail pros have used a “stick” letter to do this job. Adapted to MLM, you’d send out an actual letter immediately to your new rep:

1. What makes this opportunity different from all the others.
2. What makes YOU different from all the other sponsors.
3. The benefits the new rep will get from working with you.
4. A brief summary of the Action Plan you have to get them off to a fast start.
5. A description of how your team works together.
6. Maybe a list of resources you provide to your reps.
7. Anything else that re-inforces the decision they made.

For best results, FedEx this letter to the new rep. When you use network marketing tools like this letter, you make your new rep feel very special, and you differentiate yourself from everybody else in your business.

The Internet offers a lot of ways to earn money that didn’t exist ten years ago. One of the more popular ways of making a living on the World Wide Web is through affiliate marketing. This method of advertising rewards those who promote a product for a seller or manufacturer by giving them a portion of the sales price when an item sells. As an affiliate, you don’t actually make the sales; you simply advertise a product and direct the customer to the site where they can make the purchase. When they buy, you collect.

The system does have its rewards; one of them is that you can promote products around the clock with a Website without having to deal with customers directly. Customers can visit your Website, see your promotion for a product, and click on a link to buy it without any direct involvement on your part. In that sense, affiliate marketing can be “automatic”, but prospective marketers should not confuse “automatic” with “no effort.”

Many authors of books devoted to the topic of making money sell their books via affiliate marketing. Many of these authors, in order to increase sales, suggest that as an affiliate, you can make money on “autopilot”, and that doing so requires little or no effort. They often embellish this even further by suggesting that it is only necessary to work one or two hours a week to make a fortune online. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The truth about earning money through affiliate marketing is that it is, like anything else you might do, hard work. It is true that you can create a Website with information and links that customers may use to make decisions and purchases. Once you create such a Website, how will customers find it? You have to promote that Website, and doing so is hard work. The online marketplace is a competitive one, and establishing a viable Website while competing against thousands of others can quickly become a full time job. This is particularly true if you create more than one Website to promote more than one product.

Even if you get a lot of visitors to your Website you will find yourself continually making adjustments to the site’s content in order to increase the number of visitors who make a purchase. A simple “this product is good – buy it!” will not persuade many visitors to make a purchase. You’ll have to do a lot of time consuming experimentation in order to find something that works for you.

Is there money to be made in affiliate marketing? Of course. Anyone thinking that it’s “easy money” or that you can create a business in minutes that will start making money today should probably reconsider. As with any business, making money online is hard work.

How to increase your affiliate web site marketing income…
Whether you are interested in creating a stable primary source of income online or just looking to supplement your existing income through marketing affiliate programs…increasing your earning potential will be a constant concern. After all, the goal of any business venture is ultimately to maximize profits.

As an affiliate marketer there are two ways in which you can increase your affiliate web site marketing income. This is simply based upon the method in which affiliate programs work. Regardless of the type or program (i.e. pay per sale, pay per lead, etc.), all affiliate programs are all performance based commission opportunities. When you refer customers to your affiliate company’s website and the customer completes a certain action like filling out a form or making a sale, you receive a commission.

Therefore, to increase your commissions you really only have two options. Increase the number of customers you refer to your affiliate company’s sales site or increase the number of customers who complete the desired action once they arrive there. This second aspect of the affiliate commission equation is also known as your conversion rate or CR.

Increasing the number of customers you refer is of the two options available, the one which you undoubtedly have the most direct control over. The reason being is that the number of referrals you make is directly tied to the success of your own affiliate web site marketing efforts. Whether you market through banner ads, pay-per-click marketing, or what have you, once the customer arrives at the destination site the rest of the process is largely out of your hands.

Realistically, your CR will tend to vary anywhere from 1% to about 10% on the high end. But, how can you manage your all important CR? I say all important for a very important reason. Increasing referral traffic is of course one of you main objectives as an affiliate web site marketing professional, however which would you rather have? Would you rather have 500 referrals with a 1% conversion rate or 100 referrals with a 10% conversion rate? As you can see here, generating 5 times the referral traffic earns you…lets see; half the commission?

A fundamental difference between generating referral traffic and managing CR is this. Traffic generation and affiliate promotion will always cost you, either in time or money. Managing CR however, doesn’t cost any additional time or money. Your CR will directly reflect several important things.

How you reach your prospects…

What you say to your prospects once you reach them…

How you refer you prospects to your merchant site…

To effectively manage your conversion rates pay close attention each phase of your referral process to make sure you do the best possible job preparing customers to have an open-mind once they arrive at your merchant site. Pre-selling your prospects will make all the difference in increasing you CR.

In summary, you’ll want to focus on two goals to greatly increase you affiliate web site marketing income. Your first goal will be to maximize the amount of targeted traffic to your affiliate merchants by only spending time and money that produce maximum profit for you. Your second goal is to maximize your conversion rates by making the proper adjustments within your referral process to produce the best possible results.