Somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 to 75% of the readers of my newsletter are currently involved in the Network Marketing industry and I would assume that the numbers are similar here on my blog. I would also assume that many of those readers are involved in Network Marketing to make money.

If you are among those currently involved in Network Marketing and looking to make money, this is a rant blog post for you.

Some of you need to stop thinking about marketing and start selling some products and sponsoring some people!

We are in a crazy time in the world of Network Marketing and Internet Marketing. There are so many courses, products and training programs on the subject that I think many people have lost focus of their objective in the first place.

Bottom Line: “You get bogged down with stuff that doesn’t put money in your pocket.”

What to do?

Well if your objective is to make money, you do that by selling products and sponsoring others, right?

So, how much of your time are you dedicating to making calls to people to see if they are open to looking at an opportunity?

How much of your time is spent following up with people who have watched your video (or however you present your business)?

Last Thursday, I did an Internet Marketing Intensive Training Webinar on Twitter for my newest team members and while we went into some of the basics of setting up Twitter for success, we also spent a lot of time “going guerrilla” and finding people to connect with and call right now! If you are interested in the training, I am going to open it up to people outside of my team in September so stay tuned.

My point with all this is that if you have a choice between spending two hours studying WordPress widgets or two hours making phone calls to potential business partners, are you making the right decision?

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If you would like to be among the first to be notified about the upcoming Internet Marketing Intensive Series, be sure you subscribe to my MLM Web Secrets.

Thought you might want to check out a couple of the blog posts that I have been reading on this Saturday:

John Zehr – Equipping Your Team For Success

The Secret to Becoming A Sponsoring Machine – Faith Barnard

Time for a Tune-up with Casey Eberhart

Have you read some great blog posts today? How about doing me (and the incredible readers of TyTribble.com a favor and tell us about them in the comments…

Online Video Marketing has been hot, and growing in popularity, since before Google bought YouTube in October of 2006, for $1.65 Billion USD.

But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here… Let’s back up a bit.

We all know that Google is the giant of search engines. But why would they make such a large purchase, of such a new company?

After all, YouTube was only around 20 months at the time of this purchase, and had yet to see a profit.

Perhaps it had something to do with the massive, and almost instant, success they had.

Did you know that YouTube went from zero, to over 4 million monthly visitors, within 3 months of its launch?

Google was buying into the future of search engines.

Today YouTube is the 2nd most popular search website, although video sites are not officially ranked as search engines.

So armed with this knowledge, doesn’t it make sense to be creating videos to promote your brand & business?

6 Reasons to Create YouTube Videos

1. YouTube has over 2+ Billion views per DAY.
2. YouTube is the 2nd most used search site.
3. It’s free & easy to upload and share your videos.
4. All videos are hosted on YouTube’s servers, so you don’t have to worry about hosting if you don’t want to.
5. You, or anyone else, can embed your video onto another website, massively increasing your exposure.
6. Your videos are out there, automatically drawing in leads and building relationships , forever.

I know I’m talking a lot about YouTube, but there are MANY video sharing sites on the web today. Start with YouTube, but don’t stop there.

Getting Started with Online Video Marketing

All you really need is a recording device, webcam, camcorder, flip, or even a camera with recording capabilities will work.

I recommend starting with whatever you already have. You can always purchase a better camera later, so don’t use that as an excuse to wait!

Tips:

• Make sure you look directly into the camera.
• Set the camera on a stable surface to avoid the shaky (Blair Witch Project) look.
• Record where you’re comfortable.
• Be yourself.
• Smile!
• Don’t be afraid to talk with your hands if that’s what you naturally do.
• Watch some videos from a ‘video learning’ perspective. What stands out, good & bad. Learn from them, apply it to your video making.

Getting YouTube Videos Ranked

Generally people pay for some of the information that I’m sharing here, but I’ll give you a couple more juicy tips. To get the rest you’ll have to take my free video course.

Don’t spend hours on keyword research for YouTube videos. You’ll want to do a little, to help with topics and your title, but for the most part, let someone else do the work.

Go check out some of the most popular videos in your niche. You can open up the detailed information and look at their keywords.

By choosing the same keywords (NOT ALL OF THEIR KEYWORDS, just the ones that are also relevant to your video), you can get your video to show up as a “related video”.

You’ll want to do a search for videos in your niche. Then sort the search results by “views” to find the most popular ones. You may also want to see the most recently uploaded ones.

Don’t limit yourself

You can make more than one YouTube Channel.

Make videos for your brand, for your primary company, for personal use/family & friends… and make separate YouTube channels for them.

This allows you to tap into all sorts of things, while keeping them separate and still very targeted.

Feel free to stop by and pick up my free course for more video marketing tips.

To Your Video Success!

Susanna Hess

P.S. Don’t forget to leave a comment and tell me what you think. Feel free to add your own tips in the comments section.

So you have a blog up and running.  You’ve got some traffic…real people reading your stuff as a result of posting quality content and letting people know about it via social media.

You are even capturing some of that traffic via email opt in to a free report, video series or perhaps an interview. You are without a doubt at a crossroads. You’ve got to let your list know about your business. (That’s why you started doing all of this in the first place, right?) But you would like to make this transition as seamless and subtle as possible.

If you are hesitant to contact the people on your list about your opportunity, keep this in mind:  only 75% of the people on your list are actively involved with a particular company.

Here are 3 ways that I have used to approach people on my list about my opportunity:

1. Sell your list something. Then call to offer your help implementing what they purchased. This, in my opinion is one of the very best ways to connect with your list and get to know them better. It gives you a great reason to pick up the phone and get more personal with people.
2. Tell your list the statistics. If you know that roughly 25% of the people on your list are not active in a company, give them the stat and let them know that you know they are shopping for the right situation…offer something of value for those who might be looking for an opportunity right now. You might offer a personal one on one training session with your successful upline to anyone who signs up before the end of the month.  This should be big on value and light on the hard sell.  Maybe you offer to host and set up a blog for the first person who signs up with you at a particular level.  Your options are limitless.
3. Explain why you do what you do. Be transparent and explain your funnel.  Tell people that the reason you offer so much value and work so hard to help people is to attract people to your primary business. You are not in the business of taking people away from their current opportunity, you are providing an opportunity to those who are looking for one. Tell people what you and your company bring to the table.  (I’m not talking about “we have the best compensation plan in the world and helped more people become millionaires than Microsoft” junk.)  It’s about how you can help someone truly achieve their goals.

Important: I almost published this post without telling you that I am looking to work with one more person this month.  The person who signs up with me will get a 6 hour Internet Marketing Intensive course with a ton of Q & A ($497 value) and free access to my new product, Twitter Traffic Code – How To Drive Traffic To Any Web Site Using Twitter once it is released in September. The only requirement is a desire to break away from MLM as usual and make some money within your first 30 to 60 days. For more information, fill out the form on this page.

Early on in my blogging experience, I thought the most important thing to do was to post every single day and while I felt like much of my content was thoughtful and sometimes even insightful, as I look back, I think I missed the mark a lot of times on the quality of my posts.

I would write for the search engines and ignore the fact that everyday readers who stop in to see what I was saying or subscribe to my newsletter or RSS feed are the glue that  blog together and more.  These readers have the potential to become fans and evangelists for you and your brand.  When you write something good, they Tweet it and Facebook it.

It’s the quality content that keeps people coming back for more.  When I was writing “quantity content” for the search engines, I would get one stop traffic.  A person would find the information that they were looking for but they never received the value and quality to pull them in and make them fans.

But there is a promised land in the Quality vs. Quantity argument and that is high quantity of high quality posts.

If you are starting out and want to get the search engined to pay attention to your blog, I suggest a 30 day blogging challenge…one high quality blog post every day, 5 days a week.

Two students of mine did just that and then challenged others to do the same, offering daily tips along the way.  You can see the Facebook group page here.  It’s amazing and worth spending some time reading and participating in the community…the MLM Blogging Movement. Nearly 300 people have joined them in their challenge!

If you have no idea where to start when it comes to blogging, watch this video that outlines the biggest challenges associated with blogging and then offers some solutions.

If you are wondering if there are secrets in generating leads and making money with a blog.

Then the secret is going to be led out…

My friends, yes you can make money and generate leads with your blog. But you have to make that decision if that is what you are looking for. A blog is a central marketing tool of you expressing your opinions. Therefore, you have to lay the foundation for your blog.

If you allow me to take the next 3-5 minutes of your time. I will share with you tips that every blogger needs to know and follow to have a successful blog.

Let me share with you, 5 blogging tips that will generate traffic and a smile

1. Share what you know – I like to mention this first because it is vital that you blog about what you know. It doesn’t matter if you started blogging today.

You have information that someone else doesn’t know. Therefore, it is important to blog about what you currently know. When you know a topic it is a lot easier for you to write about it.

2. Make money while blogging – For some reason too many individuals are afraid of making money from their blog. There are ways you can turn your blog to create an income for you.

If you are going to blog, why not take some of that white space and turn it into money. You can sell affiliate products or create your product and sell it as well.

3. Stay up to date with your blog - If you can write a post everyday. Then go for it! That is the best way to jump start your blog. However, I know not everyone can put up a post everyday.

So it is important that you find a schedule when you can create a post and stick to it. When you are blogging, it’s about providing information whether it is funny or educational. By you staying up to date with your blog you’ll be able to generate leads and create an income from it.

4. Offer great information - I visit a lot of blogs and some of my favorite blogs are the ones that provide information that I can apply after reading them. I’m always looking forward to the next post because I know I’m going to learn something.

Remember this simple rule, when you are able to provide solutions to individuals problems they will come back for more.

5. Keep your blog post interesting - Since you are going to be engaging with potential prospects and building trust with your readers. It is important to keep your topics interesting so your readers will come back for more.

You don’t want to blog about the same topic over and over it will bore your readers. Here is a question, I like to ask myself, “What Am I Going To Do Different To Stand Out From The Rest of The Bloggers?” This is a question you want to keep in front of you at all times.

My friends, I want you to know that following these 5 simple tips is all I’ve done since I started JoshGarcia.com. I’ve been tempted to get side track but I stuck to the foundation that I put in place since the beginning.

Now, I’m not saying don’t try new things to generate a lead or sell a product. You must be testing and tweaking methods to increase your sales and lead generation methods.

With that said, I would love to hear from you, “What do you do different to keep people coming back to your blog?“

I spoke with my buddy Casey Eberhart this weekend at Todd Falcone’s Live Event in Seattle.  Casey did an incredible talk on Facebook and online marketing and shared his five and a half Facebook No-no’s.

1. No Sex
2. No Religion
3. No Politics
4. No Sports
5. No Negativity
6. No Mac vs PC

Keep in mind that these suggestions are specifically geared towards people who are looking to use Facebook for business.

Casey’s main point is that people on Facebook don’t really care or want to hear about these topics or to say it another way, you will not convince someone to change their mind about these topics by posting on Facebook…you will mostly just make people mad or bored.

Do you agree with the list?  What has been your experience?

Who says coming up with great blog post ideas has to be hard?  There will be many obstacles beginning bloggers face and writer’s block is one of the biggest hurdles that keep beginners stuck!  And then there are the more experienced bloggers who get stuck in a blogging rut.  To both of you, I say: “Get Over It!”  Let me show you how to easily get over writers block, get out of a rut, and make blogging part of your daily routine.

Writer’s Block? Get over it with these 4 tips:

1. Frequent blogging = ideas, ideas, ideas! The more you blog, the more ideas you get.  The act of writing one post can trigger 10 or more ideas.  As you write more frequently you’ll get more traffic and more comments, triggering more ideas! And I find that the comments from my readers give me great ideas.
2. Go outside and play! Get away from the computer! Stop being a “house-mouse” and go do something.  Lots of ideas come to me when I’m out shopping with the kids, on a walk, or on a weekend outing with my family.  Most of my ideas come to me when I’m somewhere else.
3. See what your friend’s are up to: Reading other blogs in your niche!  Their posts, the comments their readers are making, and your own comments on other blogs will give you great ideas of things to write about on your own blog!
4. Study the game: Attend training events, leadership retreats, read books in your niche, take online courses, and stay active in your education.  Everything you learn is potential content for your blog.

So, what do you do if you are still don’t know what to write about? Or still stuck in a blogging rut? Here are 25 things you can blog about:

1. Blog about your passions: If you ask my dad a question about restoring canvas canoes, he will talk to you about it for hours!  Is the topic of your blog like that for you? If you blog about what you’re passionate about you’ll always have new things to share with your readers.
2. Blogging boredom? If you’re bored with your blog, try writing in a different style, tell a story, or make a quick, fun list.  Have an alter ego character that you sometimes write in. (Make sure your character relates to a point you are making in your blog if you do this. Example: “Timid Timothy,” write about ways beginners hold themselves back from playing a bigger game online.)  Your readers will think it is fun and look forward to when you’re writing “in character.”
3. And the winner is… Hold a contest or a challenge on your blog. How about a blogging challenge with your blogging friends. 30 posts in 30 days?! Get your readers to participate with you & have fun prizes!!! Give away your products, review their blog, give away a coaching session, your favorite book, etc.
4. Bucket brigade: Make it your habit to write a hook at the end of your post hinting at what your next post will be about.  You’d better bet that if you said you’d be writing a post tomorrow on a specific topic you’ll be much more likely to get it done, and you will already know what you’re writing about!
5. Tough stuff: Explain something complicated in an easy to understand way. Use layman’s terms. Example: SEO.
6. FREE is fun! Make a list of the best free resources and tools that are available in your niche for your readers! (And don’t forget YOUR free report, audio, video, or whatever you use for opt-ins on your blog!)
7. Top Commentator: Take one of the comments you made on someone’s blog and expand on it in a post for your blog.
8. How to: We all have skills and know how to do things and we all love to know how to do new things, so teach me something new!
9. Through a beginner’s eyes: Often it’s easy to get lost in the jargon of any niche.  Create a glossary of terms for beginners in your niche.  Ask your readers to share more terms in the comments to enhance your post.
10. Ask your readers: Use a tool like survey monkey to poll your readers and ask them what their biggest challenges are.  (Also check your email and forums in your niche for common questions that people are asking.)
11. Create a checklist: My checklist posts are always my more popular posts. I get more comments and tweets. People love to check things off a list and a checklist gives them a guide to follow and something to do step by step which is really helpful for people.
12. Post a video: Using a Power Point and Camtasia or Cam Studio, using photos and music with a site like Animoto, or let us see your smiling face in a real video!
13. Shortcuts to success: Have you learned shortcuts or easier ways of doing things in your niche?  Share them on your blog…your readers will love it!
14. Tools of the trade: Share your favorite tools, resources, publications, books, etc. Things that would be helpful in your niche.
15. Review: Write a review of another blog, book, a training tool, or a product you’re an affiliate of.
16. Leverage the media: Read magazines and newspapers for blog ideas: (I was reading a backpacker magazine of my husband’s when I saw the “Get Over It” headline which triggered an explosion of ideas that I’m using in a whole series of posts, this being one of them.)
17. Leverage an event: Relate your post to an event like, back to school, holiday, something in the news, the release of a hot new movie, or the latest clever gadget.
18. Serial blogger: Write a series of posts that are all related. People like to follow a series, maybe something that is in order, where you are adding a step in each post.
19. Have a servant’s heart: Give to your readers.  Pick one of your readers and give them a free review of their blog and suggestions that would help them.  Ask them to be a guest blogger (Thanks Ty!), give away a tip’s sheet or helpful resource (no opt-in necessary), host a free Q & A call for your readers and post it on your blog.
20. Interview an expert: This could be another blogging friend, a leader in your industry or a leader in your company.
21. Everyone needs inspiration: Write a post to inspire your readers or write a blog post based on a powerful, funny, or insightful quote.
22. Top 10 list: Write a post sharing your Top 10 Blog Posts with your readers.  What about Top 10 Tips, Top 10 Quotes, Top 10 Books, etc.?
23. Case study: Share what you are doing in your business right now, what is working, and what isn’t.
24. Keys to success: Check what keywords people are searching for and landing on your blog.  Write a post that is optimized for the more popular keyword phrase.
25. Have a guest blogger write a post for you!
26. BONUS: Write about your free offer, explain what it is. Share the benefits and why your readers would want to get that. Link to it in lots of different post where your free report would expand on a topic and give them extra information.

Now, I am sure this list has given you some new ideas and it has probably helped you to brainstorm some of your own as well!  Don’t lose them! Keep a note-book, or a list on your computer to collect ideas that pop into your head. I like to send myself an email, voice mail, or record a quick video on my phone with blog post ideas I come up with so I don’t forget them.

To make my blogging routine easier, I pick my topics on Sunday night for the week, and jot them down on my calendar. That way I have a plan for the day and I don’t waste ½ my morning brainstorming and wondering what I’m going to write about for the day.

How do you overcome writer’s block or get out of your blogging rut?

About the author: Heather C. Stephens writes on the topic of online marketing at her clever marketer blog.  She teaches people how to use social media and fun, clever marketing strategies to earn additional streams of income from home.  Visit her blog and download your free Clever Marketer Kit: 7 Streams of Income!

Have you ever gone to a party where you get stuck in the kitchen talking to someone who spends the entire time talking about his job?

It doesn’t really matter how cool that job is, after a while it gets tiring.

So, how do you think people feel on Facebook and Twitter when you spend all of your time talking about your Network Marketing business?

Facebook and Twitter are a lot like a party and if you want to to be the life of the party, building relationships and networking, there are a couple of simple things that you can do.

1. Use your own picture in your profile and smile.
2. Show a sincere interest in others and ask a lot of questions. (How To Win Friends and Influence People – 101)
3. When you talk about yourself, spend 75% of your time talking about Fun, Food and Family.
4. When you talk about business (the other 25% of the time), offer real value.  Send people to quality articles on your blog, send people to quality articles on other blogs, post valuable videos. Let your opt in offer on your blog and your follow up autoresponder do the selling for you. Don’t ever sell on Twitter or Facebook.

Want to add value to this post and help build your personal brand?  Share your own Twitter and Facebook tips in the comments…

A really good way to get your name out there as a blogger is to find a blog that offers you the ability to guest post.

I am looking to feature one post a week from one of my incredible readers and up and coming bloggers.

Here is the criteria:

1. Blogging, Social Media, Internet Marketing related

2. Must by original content (not posted anywhere else previously or in the future).

3. I would like to be able to describe your post as special…amazing…incredible value…unbelievably worthwhile to read.

So if you feel that is you…visit my about Ty Tribble page and fill out the contact form.

Another bit of housekeeping is that I changed the comments section of TyTribble.com from NoFollow to DoFollow.  Google should now look at your links with more importance.  You deserve it as a community and I am so happy to give this little gift.