Okay, catchy title huh? Well, I’m definitely not the worlds number one blogging expert, in fact if you read my blog you’ll know that I was a late bloomer catching onto the blogging band wagon… and like everyone else often times struggle on what to put on my blog.

Blogging is a great way to get your message out there, and I know so many people who ask me how to market online, where to start, and what to do, and blogging as I’ve mentioned before is a simple place to start.

Why blogging? More often than not, many building their business online, especially those newer to online marketing or mlm are at loss as to where to start in building their business online. Often times they can’t afford to purchase costly leads, maybe they don’t have tons of time to call people, or any additional money in their budget to use for heavy marketing campaigns or purchasing solo ads, ezine ads, and definitely not PPC, and that makes it difficult other than friends and family on how to grow their business.

But starting a blog is simple and free.

You don’t have to be an expert, you don’t need a domain name, you don’t need to have a hosting account, heck you don’t even need to know html or how to design a webpage to start a blog. With Wordpress.org (my personal favorite) or blogger.com you can get started for free and make a great looking blog.

One of the hardest things when getting ready to set up a blog is what to say on your blog. I mean you may be a great cook, but from a business or opportunity standpoint a blog on cooking probably isn’t going to help you attract people to your business, well unless it’s about cooking. Let’s face it, not everyone is a self proclaimed expert on internet marketing, mlm building, lead generation, html design, network marketing systems, how to build a list, how to market affiliate programs, and maybe had little to no success in mlm to tell people about. (yet) So where do you start if that’s you?

Well if your promoting the #1 A Juice Company, start a blog on that, you could start a blog called, Joe Smith’s A Juice Blog, or better yet use your name. www.yourname.wordpress.com and while our doing that why not go to godaddy and get a domain name with your name and hold on to it until your ready, you just never know, I mean I had plans on doing that for a long time and when I finally got around to it, guess what my name was gone, so I use my name with my middle initial since that was available.

Once your blog is set up choose a nice theme, if your using wordpress when you login to your dashboard you’ll see themes on the left side of your dashboard, and you can choose any theme you like. Make some categories for your blog such as your companies conference call information, product news, compay updates, etc… then start posting.

Then just write (post) just as if you were talking to your best friend or your downline. Write about your companies upcoming events, your conference calls, any news or product updates, exciting facts you may have found about a particular ingredient (be careful NOT to make medical or income claims), welcome and or congratulate new members on your team, give details on your compensation plan, tell people about your great company website and juts have fun with it. Remember you can delete any post and probably right this second nobody is even reading it, so that may make you feel more comfortable in the beginning.

Most of the time you are not going to want to post multiple posts in a day, but with wordpress you can save your posts as a draft, meaning you can write your posts, save them as a draft and publish them later when you are ready. Try to post at least a few times a month to start, maybe a few times a week, if you have alot to say, post every day

As you go along you can start adding widgets, plugins, and links to your facebook or twitter account and more to your blog. The more you post, the more comfortable you get at it, the better your posts become, and before you know it you’ll be attracting people to your blog and start feeling like a blogging pro. : )

Today I wanted to cover one of the questions I get asked quite frequently and that is…
For someone with few offline contacts and little online marketing experience how do they promote their opportunity, where and how do they get people to contact or sponsor?

I’ll admit sometimes I feel like I’ve been doing this too long and stumble to find the answer because it is never as easy as it sounds and it takes patience, practice, consistency and more often than not money for marketing.

I know I tell everyone the importance of branding, of getting out there and creating their own website whether they are good at html or not really isn’t that important in this day and age with all the great site builder hosted plans out their on the internet such as weebly.com, homestead.com and others. But for many I know this is a daunting task… branding and doing ones own website was something I know I too for many years procrastinated on. Now don’t get me wrong I had plenty of websites, did lots of marketing online, but never got around until late to the personal branding and social media. I figured if what I was doing was working, why change… but you know by doing new things we branch out, learn, and you know what it increased my results 10 fold.

So if your reading this and dragging your feet on setting up your own website like I did, why not start now. Not keen on html, getting domain names and all that stuff… than see one of my previous posts on the sitebuilders and choose one that works for you.

An even simpler method, go to www.wordpress.org and set up a blog, EVEN if you DON’T have anything to write just at this moment. It will come, just start writing about your opportunity, yourself, your team, your products.

Ok, now back to what I was saying so many don’t know where to start to market their opportunity, they don’t have a personal website or blog, and just want to find the best way to get people to their company website or introduce them to their opportunity, so that’s the focus of this post.

1. Classified Advertising Websites, even free classified sites will help you get your feet wet on marketing online and start getting your opportunity and your name out there on the net. There are plenty of good free websites to use such as www.usfreeads.com , do a search on google for mlm classifieds, free classifieds, etc… and you’ll come up with dozens of places to post an ad.

Keep your ad short, captivating, and be sure that your Subject or Headline Entices them to Open your Ad, without exagerrating. : )

2. Search Ezine Advertising (an Ezine is an Online Magazine or even newsletter) and find good ezines in your target market (home based business, mlm, opportunties, work from home) and place an ad for their readership. www.solo-ads.com , www.mywizardads.com, etc… Solo ads are great, as your ad goes to the Ezine Subscribers Solo (By Itself) so you can make your ad longer and have the benefit of having the readers full attention.

3. Try Email Marketing. Believe it or not email marketing isn’t dead and I use to use this method heavily when I first started marketing. www.rent-a-list.com is a good place to start.

4. CraigsList. While I don’t search Craigslist I know alot of people do and while you may not get alot of response depending on your ad from people searching there, it will often times get you good organic search engine results if you use the right key words for your opportunity in your ad.

5. Create your Signature File to go at the end of EVERY email that you send out or respond to. Example:
Rhonda L Wagner
Making a Living Online and Loving It
Let Me Show You How
717-798-9848
skype me: rhonda.wagner
www.twitter.com/pureteamwealth
www.facebook.com/rhondalwagner
www.rhondalwagner.com

I’m sure many have better but this one works for me.

It’s all about getting comfortable working online, stepping outside of the box a bit, growing your skill set and as they say practice makes perfect. There are many great articles out there online that you can get ideas from for marketing online.

Many of the above ideas will help you get started, help get your opportunity and your name circulating out there on the internet, and most will work best if you have your own domain and website, but we’ll leave that for another post.

Live For Prosperity,

Rhonda

Adding video to your website can be fun and frustrating at the same time for most of us.

Of course one of the most popular methods is by uploading your file to YouTube® and then embedding the code they give you directly on your page where you want your video to appear. But what about those who don’t have a webcam or don’t want to publish “themselves” online but still want to create a video presentation for their website?

Animoto© is a great problem solver for this…. almost anyone with no technical knowledge can create a video presentation using animoto. They offer a free version for you to use and it’s as simple as uploading your photo images (or use theirs), adding video clips you may have on your computer, choose music (theirs or yours) add text, click create and that’s it, you’ve now made your 1st presentation for your site!

I highly recommend the site, it’s simple to use, your completed work looks like your a professional and will help your site be all the rage. : )

Live For Prosperity, Rhonda