Lead Generation at Renegade University

Lead generation is usually on the top of a business owner's list - obviously, you have to have customers to survive.  This blog was conceived as a record of the progress I make in my business and with the hopes of saving others time and money by benefiting from my mistakes and triumphs. So I sat down today and did some figuring as to what kind of results I have been getting in terms of generating leads.

Where I was One Year Ago

A year ago, I started in my first MLM. Six months later I was in debt and had exactly 1 active person on my team. I started over and decided to focus on educating myself, learning about the business and marketing before even attempting to do any more recruiting.   I started out by reading Ann Sieg's The Renegade Network Marketer.  I built an SBI website - no small undertaking since I had never done anything other than use my computer for emailing friends up to that point!

What Happened After Joining Renegade University

Four months ago, I joined Renegade University. I had a list with one name on it at the time. I knew nothing of blogs, social marketing, attraction marketing or anything about business in general. Here is what has happened in terms of lead generation since I joined Renegade University:

In the first three months I had 139 views on my SBI website. Then I joined RU and in the next four months I had 789 views.  I built a second site which has brought 861 visitors in 4 months.

My blog here at Squarespace has brought and estimated 4000 visitors in the past four months. I have to guess because the records only show me for the past month but a couple of months ago 2500 visitors came in one day, so I'm being conservative with my estimate. The past month there have been 890 unique visitors with an average of three subscribers a day.  In the past seven days, there have been visitors from 12 different countries.

My articles at ezine articles, hubpages, and squidoo have brought 1926 visitors in the past three months - 4 months for squidoo.

My YouTube videos have had 677 views since I first joined one month ago.

The Grand Total:

That all adds up to 8,253 visitors to  my content in the past four months. 8,253!

Keep in mind that these are people who found me - attraction marketing brought qualified prospects to my virtual door!

Can you imagine trying to talk to that many people one on one?  

Many of these people come back or subscribe to my newsletter or blog RSS.  That means I get to continue to build a relationship with them over time. Almost every day I get a call or email from someone wanting to know more about what I do.

I've been asked to guest blog on a high ranking blog called tamalanwar.com which also helps my articles rank high on the search engines.  Did I mention I frequently rank on page one of Google and Yahoo? 

Do I feel like I'm now on the right track to build my business?  You betcha!  Thank you Mike Klingler and Renegade University as well as all my fellow students who have helped me learn and grow.

Let Me Be Your Guide to Lead Generation

I am now a Guide at Renegade University and would love the opportunity to show you the things I've learned.  If you are wanting step by step network marketing training, come join me.  Try out the free training for as long as you wish and then upgrade for $1 and take the next week to see everything offered at the Professional level. After 7 days, you can go back to the free University level or remain a professional for $39.95 a month.  You won't find this caliber of training for that small amount very often! 

See you on the internet!

Google and Yahoo: The Snowball Effect Has Begun!

April 5, 2008 will go down as a never-to-be-forgotten day in my business!  It's the day when I saw tangible results from the work I have been doing the last four months.  I have had my head in the books or at the computer nonstop reading and learning and training.  During this time, I have been laying the foundation for my network presence so that I can launch my marketing campaign.

Through SBI, my website builder, I learned about using keywords and how to place them in my writing to please both my human visitors and the search engine spiders.  Check out my site at How To Market Guide.

With Mike Klingler at Renegade University, I have been led step by step through the process of putting articles all over the web.  He has taught me how to recognize important issues about which to write, and the mechanics of actually submitting and creating articles on places like Squidoo, Digg, EzineArticles, Facebook and more.  He even has tutorials on hiring freelance writers! The next step will involve posting videos!

On this blog, there is an article entitled, "The Renegade Under Fire."  I posted it this past Friday, April 4.  At the same time, an ezine article I had written as part of a Renegade University tutorial was published the same day. The ezine article is called "Attraction Marketing:  Internet Network Marketers Never Had It So Good!" 

Less than 24 hours later, both articles had achieved amazing search engine rankings!  "The Renegade Under Fire" is on the first page for Google and page 2 for Yahoo.  Out of 1,180,000 entries on Yahoo, my article was in the 28th position and climbing.  The ezine article was in the #5 spot for the search words "attraction marketing network marketers" on Google.  That's out of 221,000 entries!

This is not due to any genius on my part.  I'll give myself credit that I have worked hard and learned my lessons well.  But the reason for this kind of success is the training from Ken Evoy of SiteBuildIt, Ann Sieg with The Renegade, and Mike Klingler at Renegade University.  The training being offered by my new mlm team will bring more rewards as well, I'm sure.  This is why I can so confidently recommend these resources to you.  They work!

I went to bed last night feeling like I had just won an Academy Award.  I was so excited I couldn't fall asleep until well after 2 a.m.  The snowball effect has begun!  And I'm ready!

Longer Hours, Less Pay To Start - Who Wouldn't Want Their Own Home Business?

Here are the ups, downs, and lessons learned as I go about building my home based multilevel marketing business.  The purpose of this blog is to share pitfalls, business tools, and insights with others wanting to start their own business, whatever that business may be.  While each of us will have unique experiences, hopefully time and money will be saved by reading about things that have or have not worked for me.

For me, it all started in June 2007 when I was invited to a "meeting".  In exchange for a free makeover, I sat through the marketing pitch to become a consultant with a skin care company.  To my surprise, it worked!  I really did like the products and the more I learned about the company, the more impressed I was.  Moreover, the idea was presented to me that I could go on the "leadership" track rather than focus on the selling side of the business.  I would build a team and my job would evolve into one of teaching and mentoring. Note:  No matter what you are told, if there is a product involved, you are going to have to learn how to sell it.  Don't fall for "the product sells itself" line, no matter how wonderful the product may be.

If you are unfamiliar with multilevel marketing, or direct sales, there is a structure.  With degrees of variation, the basic idea is the same for different companies.  Usually, one "buys in" to the opportunity.  Some initial fees are quite high - mine was a fairly reasonable $100.00 with a 90% money back guarantee.  The starter kit will have enough information and/or products to begin, though I was encouraged to purchase more for my initial inventory.  There is quite a difference between companies as to what kind of discount is offered.  This particular company sells product to me at the wholesale price which is 50% off.  I must continue to purchase $200 wholesale ($400 retail product) every three months to qualify for the 50% discount.

Note:  Depending on the company, customers may be able to purchase products directly from the corporate office.  This is not good news for the new business owner.  If a customer wants product "xyz" and doesn't know where to get it, he/she will go to the internet and type in "xyz.com."  This means you are competing with the resources of a giant company for sales.  Far better if "xyz.com" directs the customer to you!

Every time I bring someone in to the business, they become a member of my team.  I then make commissions based on their activity.  It's important to know whether these commissions come out of the team member's pocket, or are paid by the company.  My commissions come from the company.  The more team members I have under me, the higher the commission rate.  I move up the ladder from consultant, to senior consultant, to team leader, etc. as my team grows to prerequisite numbers.  Meanwhile, by spreading the word that I am selling the product, my customer base grows as well.

There are countless business "opportunities" out there these days.  Some pay a predetermined rate as you bring in new team members.  Some offer a commission for getting customers to try the product, even if they don't buy it.  Compensation for individual sales will vary from company to company.  Note: When looking for a home business, decide ahead of time whether or not you want to deal with a physical product.  Do you have room to store it?  What if you have to ship it all over the country? 

I was ripe for new adventure and definitely interested in a way to boost my income.  Serious about investing in my new business venture, I bought about $3,000 worth of inventory, purchased business cards, read stacks of materials about the company, its founder, the products, and then headed out to "get names".  The goal was to get the contact information of a least ten people a day and then get them to come to a meeting similar to the one I had attended.  Hopefully, I would either gain a new team member or customer.

More on how that went...next time!

Update on Sunday, April 13, 2008 at 05:35PM by Barbara Silva

Haven't Heard From Me in a While?

Okay...you learn something everyday.  I am trying very hard to keep up my learning curve so that I can pass on my experiences to you.  You would not believe all the technology I have been introduced to in the last several months and there are new doo-dahs and widgets coming up all the time.

The RSS feed isn't all that new, but it was new to me.  When I enabled it on this blog, I was under the impression that subscribers would then be updated on any new content on the whole blog.  Wrong!  Each page could have its own feed, but that would be pretty cumbersome.  All this time, I thought my subscribers were receiving notice of new content on this blog whenever I put it up.  But it's only for this page!  No wonder this page was getting so many hits!  I only realized this today as I was linking a new article I wrote to this blog. 

When I realized something was off, I went back to my Renegade Professional tutorials and went through the lesson on RSS again.  Within two minutes, I was set straight and now know that you  all only get updates to this particular page.  I am a bit embarrassed since so many of you have been kind enough to subscribe!  At least, this will prevent some of you from making the same mistake! 

That's what I love about Renegade U, you can go back and get the information again whenever you need!

So now that I'm up to speed, I've decided to post an update here whenever I have a new blog entry or a new article out.  The new article is called "Attraction Marketing: Too Good To Be True?"

Thank you all so much for subscribing and I hope to bring you good, useful information that actually reaches you!

Barbara