Brian Gosur

Advice and Strategies That Will Take You Out of This World

Tag Archives: Marketing

Graduating From The School of Hard Knocks

Many of you out there have a college degree, and probably some student loans to pay off as well. I also received a degree, but mine was free. No loans for me to pay back, but there was a price to pay when you are graduating from the school of hard knocks.

Maybe some of you have taken a few courses from this very prestigious school.  I’ve seen lots of friends there, but it has been some of the hardest training that I’ve ever had to endure.

Graduating From The School of Hard Knocks

Coming out of Ford Motor Company after thirty-five years of successful service, I was looking for a new career. I didn’t want to go back to school, but I eventually signed up for some classes from the University of Hard Knocks.

I want to give you five pointers, that I learned during my time there, so that you won’t ever have to take the same courses that I did.

 

1. Do One Step at a Time

When I left Ford Motor Company and decided to change the direction of my life, the one thing that I didn’t want to do was flip burgers at the local MacDonalds, nor did I want to be a greeter at Walmarts.

I was introduced to network marketing and discovered the power of large numbers, and leveraging through a network. It’s a 120 billion dollar a year industry and many people are starting to discover this, “Business of the Future,” as Robert Kiyosaki and Donald Trump have labeled it.

But the first thing that happens is you get bombarded with business offers and solutions to help you in your business, and it can be very overwhelming to the newbie, such as I was.

Fortunately, I got introduced to some of the top marketers in the industry and I have learned so much from them.

Focus on one strategy until you master it and then use it in your pursuit of growing your business. Don’t try to spread yourself out to doing fifteen things all at once, like I did. You will just get frustrated and want to quit, it won’t work, so don’t even try it.

2. Pick a Strategy That is You

Find a marketing technique that fits you. One that your comfortable with and you can use to produce results.

Believe it or not, the best marketing strategies are free. Don’t get sucked into paying hundreds of dollars for stuff that you will never use and it will just sit as an empty desktop icon staring at you when you get on your computer.

You will go down this road, I did, we all did, it’s a class that they offer at the school of hard knocks. Learn this lesson well and as fast as you can, because you don’t want to have top repeat this class again, it can become very costly.

3. Put a Plan Together and Follow It

This was another hard lesson for me to learn. I was all over the map, because I didn’t have a blueprint mapped out to follow.

Find your one or two marketing strategies, master them and then put a daily and weekly plan of action into action, and implement your plan to success.

4. Keep Track of Your Results

Another class that is offered at the hard knock school, that I failed over and over, because I didn’t keep track of my results, whether they are good or bad.

You need to know if what you’re doing is working or not, otherwise you maybe walking down the road to failure and not even know it.

5. Make Changes When Necessary

If you aren’t getting the results that are leading you to success, then don’t ever be afraid to make changes. I was always afraid to make changes.

I’m a very patient person, and sometimes I can walk down the wrong road for a lot longer then I should, before I realize this isn’t working. I’m always trying to squeeze out every single drop of use from what I’m doing, before I abandon it.

Learn to follow your results and only do the things that are producing. Don’t be afraid to make the changes when they need to be done.

It’s all a part of the classes offered at the school of Hard Knocks, which are not all bad, as long as we learn and grow from them.

Just because it’s Christmas, I’m going to give you a free strategy that I use all the time. It’s seven videos that will explain free strategies that will get you up and running your business on the road to success, and avoid any classes in the school of Hard Knocks.

Get Your 7 Free Videos Right Here.

God bless your endeavors and have a Happy and prosperous New Year.

 

 

How Many Diets Have You Started and Stopped?

Ever been on a diet? Does a bear live in the woods? Right…who hasn’t? A better question is how many diets have you started and stopped?

How many diets have you started and stopped?

Our society today is in love with the way we look in a mirror, and to tell you the truth…not many of us have taken a long hard look in the mirror because if we did we would not be happy with what we see. I know that I am not happy with what I see.

Dieting, like marketing, has a common thread running through the middle of it. In a network marketing business, if you don’t get people off and running and putting money in their pockets they are going to jump out. Dieting is much the same way. If you are not seeing results, on the system of losing weight that you are on, you are going to quit.

Our society has an attention span of about 5 seconds. We are impatient and we want results fast, so getting people in the flow quickly is important to the success of your system.

I have never had a very big problem with my weight. It was never a big issue when I was younger and active, but as I have gotten older and less active, it now has become a problem.

The biggest problem is seeing that you may need to start paying attention to your weight, and then taking that first step to getting started on a system of weight loss and a healthy lifestyle.

I do emphasize the phrase, a healthy lifestyle, because most of us will get on a diet and even if we get the results that we want, we than jump off the diet and put the pounds right back on, and most of the time we put more on than we had taken off.

When I was younger and I had an active lifestyle I was training all the time and a healthy lifestyle was exactly that, a lifestyle, and not just a diet. I was always watching what I put in my mouth and exercise was a part of my everyday regiment.

If you are just dieting you will never succeed. You must come to the conclusion that a life change is what is needed to reach the goal that you wish to attain. This is a continuing process and not a one time set of acts to perform.

I have found the solution. I have found a process that will get you, and me, not only losing the weight that you wish to lose, but also set you on a course to a healthy lifestyle. Having more energy, feeling good about how you look, and you will start to become the new person that you really are.

The 90 Day Challenge is what I am on and it is what I am offering to you. Join me on this challenge to lose some of those pounds and get on the road to the healthy lifestyle that you’ve always wanted. Click on the box below to get more information on the 90 Day Challenge that is sweeping the country.

 

Next is the offer that I have to all you network marketers and those looking to make some extra money. The idea of losing weight through the 90 Day Challenge and the ability to market and create another source of income, is for you.

The next trillion-dollar a year industry, is what the experts are calling the health and wellness industry, and as usual, weight loss is at the very top. Who do you know wouldn’t want to lose some weight? It’s the topic that comes up in most conversations…weight loss.

What if you lost twenty or thirty pounds, do you think your friends and family would want to know how you did it? You become a walking billboard for your own business, and it’s the best marketing on the planet.

Get on the 90 Day Challenge for yourself, and I will show you how you can get yours for free while you create a residual income for yourself.

Here’s to your health.

There Are Two Words in Network Marketing – Network and Marketing

Network Marketing. Yes there are two words in network marketing. Network and marketing.

What’s a network? A network is an organization or a group of people who are all working for the same goal. That could describe the company or place of employment that you are at right now, but I would highly doubt that you are all working for the same goal.

You see, your goal might be to become president of that company one day, or maybe just a floor supervisor, but whatever it is, I can almost guarantee that they are others in the company that have the same aspirations as you do, and only one is going to get the prize.

Have you ever seen the movie, “Wall-street”? In the movie, Michael Douglas plays the CEO of a huge corporation and Charlie Sheen is the young  aspiring, goal driven, corporate executive climbing the ladder and trying to get to the top. It’s a great view of the dog eat dog life of a JOB, whether it’s corporate America or just working in a small gas station, there is always someone who wants your job. This is called a network.

In network marketing there is a network of people who are all working for the same thing, but it’s not the boss’s job they’re after. You see in network marketing, you are the boss, because it’s your business and you run your own network, or organization of people, to achieve financial freedom, and everyone in your network is working to achieve this same goal. Nobody is stepping on someone else’s toes so they can leap-frog over them and get to the top. We’re all working for the same end. No dog eat dog here.

Now the other word that is in network marketing is…marketing, and this is the one that most people forget about. Marketing is the key to running your network. Without marketing you won’t have a network for very long.

I have a friend who did not want to learn anything about marketing, all he wanted to do was find the next greatest product, put it out there and people would come from miles and miles away to purchase this incredible product that he had. That’s what he thought anyway.

Your just one peddler in an ocean of peddlers 

He came to a very stark reality that he was just one peddler in an ocean of peddlers and why should anyone consider him over another?

When you learn some marketing strategies and techniques on how important the marketing part is to your network marketing business, then and only then, will you start making some strides toward building your network and making some nice residual money in the process, and a process it is.

Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will your network marketing business be either. It’s going to take you learning some new skills and putting together an organization that will grow and propel your business into high gear.

Along with marketing skills, people skills are a nice thing to have also. If you struggle with this part, you might want to get into some training and hook up with some people who can teach you the art of listening, because that is the number one qualification to your people skills that you must have. I say art, because learning to listen well is an art and it just doesn’t come natural to most people…at least it didn’t with me.

I hated to get on the phone because I was always afraid of saying the wrong thing and that is because I was always talking to much. When I learned how to listen and let my prospect do most of the talking, it became very easy. My prospect would lead the way and I would just monitor the conversation.

Yes, there are two words in network marketing, and there are two skills that are very important to master in your network marketing business. People skills and learning the skill of listening are what you must master. They will also help you in so many other parts of your life. Really folks… listening is not a bad thing.

Just for reading all the way through this post, I’m going to give you my one hour training on how to market to over 500 million people on  Face Book for FREE! Click on the Face Book icon to get access to your FREE training now.

 

Stop Marketing – Just Talk To People

I know this is going to sound a little crazy, but to be successful in network marketing, you have to stop marketing. Yes, I said you have to stop marketing.

Every day I get email after email of some new product, or a brand new company that is getting ready to explode, and how I need to get into this, while it is still in pre-launch, or I am going to be left behind. Now I do go through all my emails, because you just never know when you might find some diamond in the rough, but I have to admit, I do go through them very fast at times, because I get so many marketing slams. I’m sure we’ve all experienced this.

This is what you have to stop doing if your doing it, and never start if you haven’t started yet. All these emails are having just the opposite effect that I’m sure their senders were intending them to have. Most people will never read them or even open them up.  They just hit delete. Nobody likes spam people. It’s very annoying.

What if you have a list? You’ve worked hard and you’ve done things the right way, and you have produced a following of people. You didn’t get these people by bombarding them with marketing, you won them over to you by building them up with valuable content and resources, that have put you in a place of leadership and knowing something that helped and benefited all of them. This builds a bond of trust and quality that will be the cement to hold your organization together for years to come. People will always buy from people they trust.

Instead of marketing, were just going to communicate with our prospects. We’re going to talk to them and explain who we are, and find out who they are and what they need. We’re going to tell them how our thing will fill the need that they have, and how it will make their life a whole lot better.  Then we’re going to spell out exactly what they should do next.

You know what? I guess that is marketing, but with a little twist. It doesn’t seem like marketing to me or to my prospects and it’s actually kind of fun. You will build relationships and customers at the same time. And if you come across the occasional jerk once in awhile, and you will , just don’t talk to them. If you wouldn’t like them as friend or co-worker, chances are you won’t want them in your business either. Pass them by and go on to the next person. Don’t waste your time.

Want friends - Become a freind and people will be attracted to you.

Once you have a following, don’t turn into one of those marketing maniacs, and send thousands of affiliate emails, trying to lure your list into buying something from you. All your doing is the same thing the others are but in reverse order. You’ve gained their trust and confidence as a leader and someone who knows, so continue to lead your group with that same hard work and energy. As you learn and grow, pass what’s working, and what you’ve learned onto them.

Stop marketing and just be you. Brand who you are. Your business and organization will grow, and those business relationships will turn into some good friends also. It’s a win win situation. Try it and let me know what you think. Leave your comment.

Become a Duplicator and Become a Success in Network Marketing

I am learning to become the great duplicator in my network marketing business. As a matter of fact we must all become a duplicators. Become a duplicator and become a success in network marketing.

My three year old grand-daughter follows me around my house where ever I go. She has become my shadow. Even when I go into my office, she will follow me in there. We are getting better at setting some rules down for her, but she is going to be a true network marketer when she grows up. I can tell because once you get her started talking, she is hard to shut down. A sign of a true network marketer.

She likes to imitate or duplicate everything that I do. She has become a duplicator of her grandpa. That’s exactly what all of us should become of the leaders in our network marketing business. Find the successful and top earners and duplicate what they do and you will be successful. These people have already gone down the road that you are traveling. They know where the potholes and curves are at. They can steer you in the right direction. All you have to do is become a master of duplication.

Listen to a webinar, read a book, or have a phone conversation, and write down the answers that you found. Implement those in your business and find out which ones worked and which ones didn’t. Pass that information onto the people in your organization. Chances are, they are struggling with the same things that you are. They are looking for answers too. You give them the information that they need to help them become duplicators also.

We live in an information age. People that have the answers and the information are the people who are sought after. They are the ones that are successful. As you are learning and growing in your business, you pass your experience and information out to others. You will start to stand out and pull away from all the other peddlers in the ocean who are just looking for someone to market their products too.

With your growing knowledge of marketing, you will know more than 90% of all other marketers. You will stand out as a leader and one who leads with value and not just another clone of everybody else. This is why you should be at every function of your business. You should be on all the webinars. Glean everything that you can from the leaders in your network marketing business. Use it and pass this valuable information on to others.

You must always carry the two P’s with you. Patience and persistence.  Remember this is not going to happen over night. It is going to take time to develop your skills and experience. Over time, your hard work, patience and persistence will make you a true leader with a great organization and a successful network marketing business.

Click the link below to watch a short video.

Network Marketing Success is Duplication

Marketing Offline

Lets talk about some off line marketing techniques first, before we get into some of the Internet marketing strategies.

The first one that I love is the $100 dollar bill drop cards. They look just like a real $100 dollar bill. One side has your information, and the other side has the look of a $100 dollar bill. You fold them in half and you have the real look of a one hundred bill. They come in other denominations, but for me, the $100 dollar bill works the best.

About 90% of all customers pay for their gas with a credit card at the pump. Very few people will go inside to pay for their gas unless they need to buy a drink or something else. After I pump my gas, I will put one of my folded drop cards into the credit card slot. The next person that comes to that pump has to take the drop card out and look at it. Now, one of two things will occur. They will read it and like it or they will throw it down on the ground. Now you have a $100 dollar bill drifting around on the ground. This is as viral a marketing technique as you can get. Everyone is going to pick that card up and take a look at it.

The next way to market your drop card is at a newspaper stand.  This is best done in the morning when the paper stands are full of newspapers. Put your fifty cents into the stand and when it opens, you will see about thirty or forty newspapers. Put one of your drop cards into everyone of those newspapers. For just fifty cents you just got some great marketing to thirty or forty people. Do this at about five or six stands and you just marketed to about 200 people for about three dollars.

The next place to market your drop cards is at the book store. Go to any Barnes and Noble or other traditional bookstore. Go to the magazine section. Look for the “Work From Home”; “Entrepreneur” or “Success” magazines. Stick your $100 dollar bill drop cards inside of these magazines. The people that purchase these kinds of magazines are the kind of people that you want in your organization.

The other place is in the books like; “Rich Dad Poor Dad” or any kind of entrepreneur or homebased business books. These are the people that you are looking to enroll in your business or enterprise.  You can also go to your library and find these types of books there. Place a drop card in each one of them.

One of the more recent best selling books was called, “The Secret”. Oprah Winfrey was a big proponent of this book. She had it on her show with numerous guests. There is a chapter in this book called “Prosperity”. What if you were engrossed in reading this book, and you come to the chapter that is titled, “Prosperity”. As you open this chapter a $100 dollar bill drops out.  Wow! The Secret Works!

These are the people that you want to recruit into your down-line. People who are reading and studying about their personal development. People who want, and are learning how to be successful entrepreneurs.

Drop cards are a great way to generate good quality leads for your business because…….they work.

Patience is Required When Prospecting

How many of you love fishing? I am not an avid fishermen, but I do enjoy getting out and relaxing in a boat with a fishing rod in my hand. I may only do it once or twice a year. It’s not for the love of the sport, it is more for the relaxing time that I go. The camaraderie that you have with a couple of good friends and the occasional fish that you might catch. I enjoy that.

There is one thing that you must have while you are fishing. That’s patience. If you struggle with patience you will not make a good fisherman or a good prospector for your business. Fishing is a lot like prospecting.

Lets examine this further. First you have to go out to the right spot. You just don’t go to where you want to go. You have to go where the fish are. You see, when you are prospecting you may have to get out of your comfort zone and go to where your target market is. Like we said before, talking to grandma and Uncle John are probably not going to get you very far in your prospecting attempts. Oh they will listen to you, but your bank account will soon run dry.

When you see a certain marketing strategy, that you really like to do, is not working out for you, change the location. Or try a different marketing technique. Don’t get frustrated and do what the 95% of all network marketers do after about sixty days of working their business. Quit! “This isn’t working for me, I quit!” Patience is required when prospecting.

Try a different spot on the lake. Use a different lure or maybe these fish like worms?  The fish are out there. You just have to be patient. Find them, and use the right bait. You’ll catch em.

One example of this is when I first started video marketing. I was not a good candidate for the screen. At least that’s what I thought. I was nervous and fumbled my words, but I keep working at it. Practiced what I would say before I went in front of the camera. (You don’t want to be reading a scrip.) Finally I put my first video out and I had more people say how good my video was. I thought I was terrible. Sometimes you have to get out of your comfort zone. Try different marketing techniques, even if you are uncomfortable with them.

Ever catch a small fish, or one that just wasn’t right? What did you do with that fish? Throw em back in the water?  Sometimes you have to do that. A person in your organization just doesn’t have it or wants to leave for this, that, and the other reason. Let em go. Throw them back. There are more and bigger fish in the lake. It’s the big fish that your looking for anyway.

Remember, once you learn the art of marketing and prospecting, it doesn’t matter what kind of business that you are in. You will be able to find the fish. You will have an arsenal of lures to attract the right fish to you, and you will have the right strategies and techniques to catch those fish and bring them into your boat.

Be patient! Fishing takes time, and so does prospecting. Remember. Quitters never win, and winners never quit.

Leaders Lead With Value

There is a friend of mine that believes in leading with an iron fist. He is the boss and everyone should jump to attention when he snaps his fingers. He does have the best behaved kids. His wife keeps the house clean and never skips a beat when it comes to preparing his meals. There is only one thing wrong. His whole family hates him and they are afraid of him. This is not how you lead.

True leaders lead with value. You cannot expect people to follow you when you don’t know where you’re going. The value that you hold out to them and give to them is going to mark you out and make you an attractive person to follow.

We live in the information age. The industrial age is gone. What you know and experience is very valuable to others. People want to know. You have learned and put into practice this knowledge. That information holds value for others. It sets you apart from the rest of the used car salesmen that are chasing everyone around trying to ram their products down everyone’s throat. You are giving information that people want.

What if you are just new to the business of network marketing? Maybe you don’t have any value to give. Sure you do. Write about your experiences. Do some research on your peers or a company that you may be  interested in. Write an unbiased review in an article about what you know and what you have learned. Start a blog and post that information for all to read. Send it out to article directories like E-Zine or Digg. You are going to be posting information that you know just because of the research that you did.

Whenever you go to company functions, make sure you bring your video camera. Take videos of interviews with the leaders that are inside of your industry. Take notes with the leaders that you are trying to emulate. You will not only learn and grow from their information, but just by association, people will begin to identify you as a leader, because you hang around with leaders. Go back and read my story about the clowns in Attraction Marketing Rule #3. You are known by the company you keep.

Write articles about direct sales and network marketing. Submitting these articles to places like Linked In and Face Book. Over 350 million people are on Face Book. Remember you are becoming a master of your trade. Sharing this information is going to position you as an expert and a leader.

A colleague of mine generated over 11,000 leads in three and a half months, and netted just under $45,000 in that period simply by writing articles and using a simple system to get himself ranked on top of Google. He had never done any internet marketing before this and he is using only article marketing in his arsenal of internet marketing tools.

I will be getting a little bit more detailed as to some of these marketing strategies and how you can become very effective in using them. That will be coming in future articles.

But the best part about all of this is……..it’s free.

Prospecting

It’s going to take your marketing expertise and efforts to generate the leads that your business is going to need. It’s also going to take the prospecting  skills that you will need to develop and turn those leads into the cash flow of your business. Prospecting is going to become the heart and sole of your business.

Becoming proficient at prospecting is going to take some education. Prospecting always starts on a physiological level. This is where most people, including myself, fall flat on our faces.

I was not born with an A-type personality. I was more of the, sit in the back of the room kind of guy, and just listen to people. I learned that listening skills are very important when it comes to prospecting, but it is only part of the equation.  You still have to know when to listen and when to talk and what to say when you do talk.

This might sound very complicated. I made it more complicated then it had to be, as most people do, when it comes to prospecting.

When I worked in the mortgage industry, we used to do cold calls to get leads. We were told we could go home after we got fifty No’s. Well that never happened. You see, after you would get a couple of hang-ups and some “not interested”, you would get an application. That would take some time. You would build a report with that person, and before you knew it, an hour or more has just gone by. You see my fears were all in my mind. I was paranoid for nothing.

As I educated myself on our products, and the prospecting techniques that I would use, I could relax and be myself. I could now use those listening skills that I had, and work on the others that didn’t come as easily.

All those hang ups, and all those No’s were just a training ground for me to develop and grow my prospecting skills. You have to get it out of your head that prospecting is painful. The phone is your friend. All those No’s brought me closer to a yes.

Remember, we are talking about attraction marketing. You have learned how to laser beam your target market. Your target market is other network marketers. We learned that in the first article of this series. If your prospecting other network marketers, your closing ratio should be very good.

Embrace the art of prospecting. Embrace all the no’s. Prospecting will become a fun daily routine that you will look forward too. Yes I said a daily routine. Because if your not prospecting, your bank account is not growing.

Attraction Marketing Rule #4

Rule number four for the implementation of attraction marketing to your business is marketing and prospecting. You must spend a good majority of your time to this purpose. Most people fall apart at this point. This is the life blood of your business. This is what pays the bills. Without marketing you won’t have prospects and without signing the prospects you won’t have the money to put into your bank account.

First there’s marketing. How many sources are you using to market your business? If you are just talking to family and friends, that’s one source. Making cold calls is another. If you are only doing one or two different types of marketing techniques, you are limiting yourself to the people you are targeting. How effective will your marketing be. You see,  people respond to different things.

Have you ever heard of Google? The number one website in the world. What about Yahoo? The number two website in the world. You Tube? The third largest website in the world. Maybe you’ve heard of Face Book. Face Book, with 350 million users, is the fifth largest website in the world. Let me ask you a question. What kind of presence do you have on these, the largest websites in the world? If you don’t, why not? These are only four of the many sites that you could be marketing on.

Most people only remember the first word in network marketing. Yes they call all there family and friends and network  like crazy. But what happens when you run out of these people to talk too?  It’s not if it will happen, it’s when it will happen. Your warm market is going to dry up. Then you will have no choice but to learn how to utilize the second word, marketing.

Most people jump into their business without a clue as to how to market. Would you jump into a 747, sit in the cockpit of the plane, and expect to fly that aircraft? I don’t think so. So why do you think you can start a business and without any knowledge of how to market, expect to carry your business into profitability. Not going to happen.

When you learn how to market, it doesn’t matter what kind of business you have. When you learn how to market, you will be able to separate yourself from all the other peddlers. That’s why those that understand marketing can come into your business, and within months, shoot right up to the top of the leaders.

Think of marketing like food. If you don’t eat your body becomes weak and unresponsive. The same is true if you don’t learn marketing. Your bank account will become weak and unresponsive.