Direct Sales, Network Marketing & Home Party Plan Blog

I read an article posted on a self improvement blog site from two years ago that had this same headline and the list of 10 things to do below. The most interesting thing about the post was that there were about 420 comments, many several paragraphs in length.

The author hit a nerve I believe in his assertions that confidence can be improved by a combination of attitudes and behavior as stated in this list:

1. Dress Sharp
2. Walk Faster
3. Good Posture
4. Personal Commercial
5. Gratitude
6. Compliment other people
7. Sit in the front row
8. Speak up
9. Work out
10. Focus on contribution

His lead in stated the following:

“Self confidence is the difference between feeling unstoppable and feeling scared out of your wits. Your perception of yourself has an enormous impact on how others perceive you. Perception is reality — the more self confidence you have, the more likely it is you’ll succeed.”

For the network marketer, when trying to win over people into your business or convey any sense of leadership ability, you must be aware that people have a keen sense of your confidence. It’s like a sixth sense. It may be subtle, but people can sense it and they are watching for it.

Lack of confidence is very difficult to hide if you don’t have it. People are looking to invest in someone who conveys leadership qualities, one being that of confidence.

So you can say that your degree of success is in part, tied to your degree of self confidence. Your degree of self confidence is also reflective of how you handle fear, doubts and worries. Your ability to act on those perceived fears gives you a sense of confidence that can be perceived through your attitude and actions.

The key thought is whether you perceive anything as fear and to what degree. Something may be fearful to most people, but to you, it may be no big deal. The way you handle it conveys your sense of confidence that people see.

So if you are fearless you will always be perceived as confident. One must therefore look upon their thoughts without fear and they will develop a demeanor that is seen as confident. Sounds too simple right?

The difference between outright fear and feeling unstoppable is a state of mind that is hard to completely erase with simply putting on nice clothes or walking quickly. Thoughts change constantly.

Your ability to feel confident has to do with both your feelings of fear and your feelings of self worth. Subconscious thoughts of self doubt and self worth can sabotage you and limit your ability to counter your sense of fear in any given situation.

So when someone is perceived as not having self confidence, is what they are also seeing their self esteem? Yes, but acting courageously can be your ability to be confident while on the inside battling your feelings of self worth.

Your negative thoughts don’t always have to hold you back. It’s how you decide to act upon them that determines your confidence and how you are perceived.

Let’s say you are in a bar, you see an attractive person across the room and you’re buddy urges you to go over and ask her to dance. In fact, he challenges you. Your feeling of fear goes through the roof. You fear that you will be rejected and look like a fool in front of everyone.

Public humiliation (in the form of looking stupid while public speaking) is the number one fear of most Americans. Your voice of self esteem kicks in reminding you of what happened the last time you did such a thing. You replay the tapes and getting a chill over your body. You react with emotional pain and a decision not to risk it again for fear of experiencing this feeling of pain once again.

However, if you are a rejection junkie with extremely low self esteem, you will indeed go over to the person, get rejected, and then subconsciously affirm that you were right. Your low self esteem part of your brain said to you that there’s no way you can succeed with that woman. That you are not successful because of your ongoing negative thought patterns and its no time to start changing your thinking! Because that is who you are!

Now, let’s say the friend who challenged you decides to go over and ask the same woman to dance. Does he have fear? Perhaps. Does he look confident?

Yes. But he made the decision to act upon his perceived fears. He dismissed his thoughts of inaction because he dismissed the thoughts as being irrational and he had the power to control his own thoughts by dismissing them and to conquer them. The woman agreed to dance with him in part because he exuded self confidence. For it was not a reason for rejecting his offer had she chose.

Is having high self confidence merely a protective shield against feelings of fear? It is if you’re faking it. People can pretend and sometimes get away with it. But to not address the self sabotaging thoughts through internal dialogue will result in that suppressed deep down feeling of lacking confidence to persist.

Courage is the opposite of fearful. Courage is a perceived attribute one has when judging other’s attitude and behavior. Courage is “feeling the fear and doing it anyway”.

Afterwards, you can meditate and address your thoughts of fear so that next time you can always do “it” – without the fear – confidently.

“Somehow I can’t believe that there are any heights that can’t be scaled by a man who knows the secrets of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four C s. They are curiosity, confidence, courage, and constancy, and the greatest of all is confidence. When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.” – Walt Disney
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John Stuart Leslie is a network marketing professional providing solutions to struggling network marketers looking to stay in the game and achieve their goals.

If you are a reserved person the idea of networking and meeting people to tell them about your business can strike absolute terror in your soul. However, networking still remains a productive way for many sellers to help increase their leads base and grow their businesses. The following steps can help reserved professionals become more effective networkers:

1. Recognize and deal with the aspects of networking that bother you most. For example, if you’re scared of meeting people, begin by practicing with friends and family members.. Tell them about your interests, training and abilities. Or, if you’re worried about becoming tongue-tied, role-play your meetings until you feel confident about what to say.

2. Get very comfortable with your 30-second “commercial” so whenever you have the opportunity to tell it to someone it just rolls off your tongue. The commercial should included what you do, your specialty, what problem you can solve with your services, etc. It should let the person understand immediately what you do, your particular specialty (niche) and how it can help a particular problem. Think of it as your “verbal logo.”

For instance, when that person you’ve just given your verbal logo to sees you across the room, they should be able to easily identify you with what you do. Even though it will be rehearsed, be sure that you don’t sound that way. The easiest way is to have a couple of versions you can choose from at the last minute. This also helps if you’re standing with people whom you’ve given your verbal logo to and a new person walks up. You can introduce yourself and give a slightly different verbal logo so it doesn’t sound identical to the rest of the group. It should sound conversational and clear.

3. Make calls when your energy is highest. If you know that you’re more upbeat after lunch, save phone calls until then and use the morning for administrative tasks.

4. Know what you want to say when calling. Develop a script that includes your key points and use it to make sure you mention important items. Many introverts have difficulty making small talk. By learning about your contacts and their companies, you can direct your conversations and make them more meaningful.

5. Take time out to replenish yourself. Plan your schedule so that you have periods of solitude that allow you to recharge. For instance, don’t schedule a full day’s activities if you plan to network at an evening event.

While you don’t have to change yourself, you’ll need to learn extroverted skills and behaviors to become a more effective networker. Like an acquired taste, your appreciation for networking may grow. And when you start receiving the benefits, your appetite for it may even increase.

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K. Moehr, president of Moehr and Associates, a specialty marketing and publishing firm.

It’s obvious that if you don’t have a website then it’s going to be pretty tough to do business online. And I’m going to briefly tell you why the company provided website will never work to build your business online.

The company provided website is useful as a tool to educate your prospects once you have already captured their information and they are in your campaign. That’s about it. The reason why you need your own website is because you HAVE to position yourself as different from everyone else. Otherwise, what reasons do people have to join you?

Remember the reasons why people would join you in your business? How different are you if you go and enter your name in a form to get the same website everyone else and their uncle has? You’re not very different. Furthermore, those websites are not capture pages. They do not generate leads. Make no mistake, the most important thing to grow and expand your business is to constantly be generating new leads. Endless leads means endless business growth. When you discover how you can create endless leads at will, you created a system that will produce you endless money at will.

Hands down, that is the essence of what network marketing is about. It’s all about the leads. So the reason why most company specific pages don’t work is because:

1. They are terrible at generating leads. They have poor lead conversion rates.

2. They are mass duplicated systems, meaning everyone knows they are basically going to get the same thing. They are going to opt in and get the same boring emails about the company’s financial history, the market trends, and the same stuff they hear from every other company.

3. The auto responder system set up on those pages will not suffice to do the job we need to get done. Plus the page is not capturing leads anyway, and I would never spend my hard earned money to send people to my website if the website was only a fraction as productive as one I could build myself.

Hence the reason you need to create your own website.

Now there are two different versions of websites that you can create for our purposes of capturing leads on the internet. I am going to cover them both and tell you what situations you want to use them both in.

1. A squeeze page. A squeeze page is a website that is 100% created with the purpose of doing nothing other then capturing a lead. It is meant to squeeze a person’s information in the quickest and most effective way possible. Squeeze pages are well oiled funnels that lead a person directly to the desired action you want them to take. In this case, it is leaving their contact information in exchange for the information they want from you.

2. A content page. A content page is more like your typical full blown website. A content page is generally less productive at converting leads, but very useful for many reasons none the less. In particular when it comes to generating a certain type of traffic which I will be talking about later on. Not only that but you can load your content page with all sorts of ways to capture people’s emails and generate opt ins. Once you have the traffic…the possibilities are endless.

In order to do internet network marketing successful I suggest you personally create both of these different types of websites. Your priority however, is absolutely on a squeeze page.

If you just had a squeeze page, you could still get by A LOT better, but a full blown content website comes in very handy on the back end of your campaign. A content website is essential for one other task, and that is Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is a term that stands for your website being ranked highly in the major search engines. Since search engines are getting very competitive now a days, the only way sites get ranked very highly at all is by having LOTS of relevant and targeted information.

A squeeze page would never do it. So if you want to take total advantage of the internet to build a network marketing organization, I recommend tackling both of these website projects and utilizing all of it to its fullest potential.
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Toki Tover trains and mentors others in creating wealth-on-demand through “personal branding” using cutting-edge marketing systems and video.

When I first got into business online, I didn’t really know what it meant to be a network marketer or be involved in multi-level marketing (MLM). I wanted to sell a product and a service that would eventually generate a good residual income for me. It is becoming clearer to me now as I get into network marketing that it does take a certain kind of person with certain skills to excel in this business, but if you’ve got the desire, passion, energy, and commitment to be successful at it, then anyone can do it!

Network marketing, or multi-level marketing is about people. It’s about building and team – a downline – and teaching them to be successful like you. Yes, there are different levels in the organization you build, but that’s not to say that all network marketing endeavors are pyramid schemes. As long as there is something of value being offered in the program and it’s not a program designed to pay only those higher up in the pyramid, then you are pretty safe.

Once you are into a network marketing program, you have to work on yourself and your own success before you can hope to achieve success with others you recruit. The problem is that many people are attracted to the big money aspect of it, and hope to make it big with little effort on their own part. Once you’re in, you have to make a commitment to yourself and your program, no matter what big hitters are above you, and you have to work it like any other business. This will take time, and you have to be willing to invest that time, and believe that in time you will see the results you seek.

Believing is huge in this industry because you start with a dream. There is a reason you got involved in network marketing, and one of the big reasons might be that you want to be a millionaire. The trick is to believe and feel that you already are, even if you’re far from it. This kind of positive attitude must be maintained, even though everyone will go through good times and bad in their businesses. If you love what you do, you will be able to maintain a healthy attitude and the discipline needed to propel you to greatness.

Most people think that network marketing is about making sales when really it is about relationships with your prospects, your customers, and your team. The best way to be confident about relationship building and team-building is to educate yourself and develop the skills you need to succeed. A lot of it has to do with conquering your fears about talking to new prospects by analyzing what the fear really is and developing the skills you need through practice and repetition. Part of relationship building is also to be a leader to your team and knowing how to handle objections to your offers, or excuses for not joining. Being prepared with a list of questions for your prospects will help you deal effectively with their issues.

Network marketing can be a business for those who are willing to work at it. Money won’t grow on trees, so if you want to be successful at it, then take the time to learn, grow, energize yourself, love yourself and what you do, and carry yourself and your team to the top!

Several times my daughter had telephoned to say, “Mother, you must to see the daffodils before they are over.” I wanted to go, but it was a two-hour drive from Laguna to Lake Arrowhead “I will come next Tuesday”, I promised a little reluctantly on her third call.

Next Tuesday dawned cold and rainy. Still, I had promised, and reluctantly I drove there. When I finally walked into Carolyn’s house I was welcomed by the joyful sounds of happy children. I delightedly hugged and greeted my grandchildren.

“Forget the daffodils, Carolyn! The road is invisible in these clouds and fog, and there is nothing in the world except you and these children that I want to see badly enough to drive another inch!”

My daughter smiled calmly and said, “We drive in this all the time, Mother.” “Well, you won’t get me back on the road until it clears, and then I’m heading for home!” I assured her.
“But first we’re going to see the daffodils. It’s just a few blocks,” Carolyn said. “I’ll drive. I’m used to this.”

“Carolyn,” I said sternly, “Please turn around.” “It’s all right, Mother, I promise. You will never forgive yourself if you miss this experience.”

After about twenty minutes, we turned onto a small gravel road and I saw a small church. On the far side of the church, I saw a hand lettered sign with an arrow that read, ” Daffodil Garden .” We got out of the car, each took a child’s hand, and I followed Carolyn down the path. Then, as we turned a corner, I looked up and gasped. Before me lay the most glorious sight.

It looked as though someone had taken a great vat of gold and poured it over the mountain peak and its surrounding slopes. The flowers were planted in majestic, swirling patterns, great ribbons and swaths of deep orange, creamy white, lemon yellow, salmon pink, and saffron and butter yellow. Each different-colored variety was planted in large groups so that it swirled and flowed like its own river with its own unique hue. There were five acres of flowers.

“Who did this?” I asked Carolyn. “Just one woman,” Carolyn answered. “She lives on the property. That’s her home.” Carolyn pointed to a well-kept A-frame house, small and modestly sitting in the midst of all that glory. We walked up to the house.

On the patio, we saw a poster. “Answers to the Questions I Know You Are Asking”, was the headline. The first answer was a simple one. “50,000 bulbs,” it read. The second answer was, “One at a time, by one woman Two hands, two feet, and one brain.” The third answer was, “Began in 1958″

For me, that moment was a life-changing experience. I thought of this woman whom I had never met, who, more than forty years before, had begun, one bulb at a time, to bring her vision of beauty and joy to an obscure mountaintop. Planting one bulb at a time, year after year, this unknown woman had forever changed the world in which she lived. One day at a time, she had created something of extraordinary magnificence, beauty, and inspiration. The principle her daffodil garden taught is one of the greatest principles of celebration.

That is, learning to move toward our goals and desires one step at a time–often just one baby-step at time–and learning to love the doing, learning to use the accumulation of time. When we multiply tiny pieces of time with small increments of daily effort, we too will find we can accomplish magnificent things. We can change the world …

“It makes me sad in a way,” I admitted to Carolyn. “What might I have accomplished if I had thought of a wonderful goal thirty-five or forty years ago and had worked away at it ‘one bulb at a time’ through all those years? Just think what I might have been able to achieve!”

My daughter summed up the message of the day in her usual direct way. “Start tomorrow,” she said.

She was right. It’s so pointless to think of the lost hours of yesterdays. The way to make learning a lesson of celebration instead of a cause for regret is to only ask, “How can I put this to use today?”

Use the Daffodil Principle. Stop waiting…..
Until your car or home is paid off
Until you get a new car or home
Until your kids leave the house
Until you go back to school
Until you finish school
Until you clean the house
Until you organize the garage
Until you clean off your desk
Until you lose 10 lbs.
Until you gain 10 lbs.
Until you get married
Until you get a divorce
Until you have kids
Until the kids go to school
Until you retire
Until summer
Until spring
Until winter
Until fall
Until you die…

There is no better time than right now to be happy.
Happiness is a journey, not a destination.
So work like you don’t need money.
Love like you’ve never been hurt, and, Dance like no one’s watching.

Don’t be afraid that your life will end, be afraid that it will never begin. ~anonymous