Demographics, Metrics, and Advertising on the Internet

We are going to do a little review today since we have talked about so much so far. We have talked about selling products and recruiting, and I often mix the two because doing both is similar in a lot of ways. For this article, we are going to talk about the effort to recruit or sponsor a new distributor for your company. If we choose a random person out of the population, we learned that perhaps 1 in 100 will eventually join. And of those that you sponsor, only 1 in 100 will sell and or recruit. In other words, to get three producing distributors, you must contact about 30,000 people.

We learned that we can improve the odds of sponsoring, or reduce the number of people we contact, by contacting the right people. We do this by devising a demographic profile for a person who would sign up as a distributor. For instance, the person might be interested in business. They might be your best customers who want to buy at a discount. They might be top sales people. There are many answers to who might be someone who wants to be your distributor and you may start with one picture and change it later. But the more specific and accurate your picture is, and the more you can find people who match it, the fewer people you will have to contact before somebody signs up.

A metric is simply a measurement and we can use it in the following way: you must contact 100 people per distributor signed; that is a ratio of 100:1. As we improve our method of finding and qualifying people, hopefully our ratio falls to 10:1. Note that these are sample figures and only to be used for illustration. It might be that it takes 1000 random people to find 1 distributor, it really depends on many factors. But the point is that it takes much more random people contacted to find a distributor then if we only contact people that fit our demographic profile. And by continuing to improve our profile, we can improve our ratio.

Advertising on the internet can be great because you can be really, really specific about your demographic profile and actually find people that match it. In addition, you can do all kinds of metrics through tools provided to you or tools that you create yourself. For instance, if you do search advertising with Google Adwords, you can have Google display an advertisement when a particular search is done. For instance, when somebody searches "home business ideas", it will pop up your ad. If the searcher likes your ad, they will click on the link and go to your site. A Google Adwords ad is sort of like a classified advertisement so you can also filter your prospects by wording your ad just right.

Google Adwords provides business people with all kinds of tools to measure the effectiveness of their advertisement. It shows how many times your advertisment was shown, for which search terms, and how many times searchers went to your site. The click-through ratio is a measurement of displays to clicks. You can also measure warm leads to clicks pretty easy by seeing how many visitors request information. Web space providers often provide data on unique visitors and much much more.

Google Adwords is just one example within a virtual universe of endless possibilities. Please feel free to do research on internet advertising by doing a search and see what you can come up with.

Motivation and Metrics

I have much more to talk about with regard to advertising, but I thought we would take a break today. And that is what you need to do sometimes because you have to enjoy your life. We get so busy beating our head against a brick wall in business that we do not realize we still need to be social, we need other activities, and generally we need to do things we enjoy. If you cannot both live your life and run your business, you will not be someone that people want to be around. It might also be a good idea to avoid business talk in social situations, where we are getting away. Note that we sometimes use social situations strategically for business, but there is a time and place for this.

It can be hard to stay motivated and getting away is one thing we can do to remain motivated to keep pressing on with our business. It is tough going day after day networking to build your business and have nothing happen. I am sure you ask yourself whether this is worth it or not. To determine whether it is worth it, perhaps you measure by looking at sales per contact or new distributors per contact. Personally, I would set the bar a little lower. How many contacts are you making? Of these contacts, how many act interested? You can use this to gauge warm leads per contact. If you are getting any warm leads at all, you are doing pretty well and you should pat yourself on the back.

If you are getting no warm leads at all, perhaps your demographic profile is a bit off. It might be a good idea to look at this and make adjustments. Are you contacting enough people? If your demographic is good and you are contacting these kinds of people, at least one in ten should show some interest. If you are contacting random people, your ratio may be as low as 1 in 100, which can be very discouraging, so make sure to contact the right people.

Metrics is about measuring, as we were measuring warm leads to contacts. We can also measure many other things and try to improve these measurements. However, remember that we want to sponsor the right distributors not just anybody, so we need to do things properly to make sure the right people join. This may mean that only 1 in 100 contacts join but that is ok. Better one hard working distributor than a bunch of drop outs or MLM junkies.

One thing about selling product that you probably need to know. Once you have a lead that wants or needs your product, you need to ask for the sale. I like something like this: “If you buy today I can offer you a 10% discount.” This creates a little urgency and offers a bargain to the customer. Closing a sale is important in selling but the opposite is true in sponsoring. People will sign up in their own time and you should be there when they have questions. They need to want to do the business, so let them sign up when they are ready.