Leads
At the heart of any online business are leads – people who have expressed interest in the type of product you sell, even if they have not purchased. How do you get leads? You can get involved in anything from List Builders to Traffic Exchanges, but I always recommend starting with Magnetic Sponsoring (from now on, MS). The first thing you get with MS is an e-book that explains a lot of the psychology of attraction marketing. This is like Marketing 101 – something that anyone who is serious about online business must know. There is also some basic training included on the site. Then you are given the opportunity to use their system to turn around and sell Magnetic Sponsoring to others, giving you a $20 commission on every sale. This is a great way to get started. You will begin to accumulate some operating income so you can move on to more advanced marketing.
Plan on using MS exclusively for at least a month – preferably two. During that time you could make it your goal to get at least 10 new leads and maybe a couple of purchases.
Once you are comfortable with Magnetic Sponsoring and are getting leads consistently – a few every week – then you can graduate. I recommend moving up to My Lead System Pro (MLSP). This system incorporates MS into its marketing funnel, and then goes on to walk you through a more complex (and complete) marketing system. They will walk you through the set-up of your auto-responder. They even have follow-up letters that you can import. There are a ton of training videos to help you understand each step of the process. This is like Marketing 201 – a little more advanced course. The beauty is that you can continue earning commissions from MS and now add commissions from the MLSP sales funnel.
Sales
It is assumed that you are following up with all the leads you are making. They will see you as a knowledgeable person and someone that they will listen to when you make a suggestion. It is at this point that you start to market your main sales item to your leads. Your main promotion can be vitamins, juice, cards or candles. Now that you have your leads (and continue to build that list and make money from doing so), this is where you promote your product.
After doing this for about a month, you will begin to see patterns. You will be able to tell how many people join as a result of each letter that you send, or other marketing event that you sponsor. And so you begin to make a plan for the future. More marketing will produce more leads. More leads will produce more sales.
As you get to know your business better, you can begin to make quite detailed plans for what you expect to happen in the next 6 months or a year. You will also know what kinds of expenses to expect, and what the relationship is between your expenses and the resulting leads.
In a future post we will discuss in detail the whole are of how to market for leads, but with this general picture in mind you can start to write out a business plan that will get you through the first six months or so.
Leave a comment if you create a business plan. Is it helpful? How specific are you? Share your experience.