A good website can act as your sales and orders department and your fulfilment department. But the real power of the web is it can give you plenty of new customers, the lifeblood of any business.
There are hundreds of different opportunities for people to start earning a small income on a part time basis then growing it into a full time business.
The problem with most of these opportunities is that they miss out on the crucial step - finding new customers. Many MLM's encourage consultants to send emails to their friends and contacts, but this is very limiting.
Why a Free Website is Worth What You Pay For It
Many business opportunities provide a 'free' website, usually a subdomain of the company's site 'personalised' with the consultant's name near the top corner. Typically this site has a web address like www.opportunity.com/johnsmith. It is exactly the same as other sites except for the consultants name in one corner.
Often the company will encourage you to get your own URL such as www.johnsmith.com and redirect it to your subdomain. This gives your readers the slightest hint that they may be dealing with a real person but the difference is minimal.
Neither of these types of websites fully exploit the power of the web. They have no drawing power, search engines will not send visitors as they contain no real information.
Alternatively a content based website will give you a steady flow of new customers. They will be sent by the search engines and they are people who are looking for your services or products.
What Your Own Website Can Do For You.
- You can only control how you deal with your customers if you have your own website, not one where your name is plugged into some generic material.
- A content based website gives you fresh leads. How? The search engines will recognise that you are providing fresh original content. They are steadily improving their algorithms to seek out the best content pages to be favoured. Cookie cutter pages where the only variation is the name of the consultant are definitely not what they are looking for. Only your own material will tap this source of traffic.
- When the visitors come to your site they will see you as a person with something to say, not just a button to click and to buy. As web marketing guru Ken Evoy says you have a chance to 'presell' your visitors rather than chasing them away with a hard sell.
- Your own website lets you build your own list, and this is really the most valuable part of your business. Many companies are folding and failing at the moment. If your marketing company is one of them you stand to lose everything if you don't own your list.
- There are many more ways to monetise your traffic. This is another example of spreading your eggs over several baskets. Suppose you are a consultant for a wine tasting/sales program. If you have your own website and you will have the opportunity to market other goods, say wine accessories, books or kitchenware or run advertisements for wine travel, but the parent company won't let you do that on their website.
Ann Sieg is an experienced and enthusiastic network marketer. She likes to think outside the square. Some of the ideas in this article are derived from her ebook 7 Great Lies of Internet Marketing
Darby Higgs - Darby Higgs is a wine writer and webmaster based in Melbourne Australia. He is the Author of Emerging Varietal Wines of Australia: a guide ...
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