What Are the Best Network Marketing Tools?
If you are smart you will want to find out what tools the top industry leaders are using to build their business on a daily basis and then emulate them.
Technology evolves at a rapid rate, and there is so much information out there that it is difficult to sort through the mess and find what is actually going to be beneficial to your network marketing business and what can be discarded as a useless side track. Follow the industry leaders and copy what they do.
Network Marketing Tools for Your Business
If you are new to the business, or even if you have been around for a while, you may be wondering what are the best tools to use?
While every network marketing/mlm company puts out their own tools and materials for this, in my opinion, most of the ‘sales aids' put out by your network marketing company are a complete waste of money and time.
Avoid the temptation to spend lots of money on shiny tools with lots of bells and whistles… [they] will pull you away from the true marketing activities.
These tools are usually not very effective at helping you perform the two most important network marketing activities – finding qualified prospects or leads, and demonstrating to them that you provide valuable leadership.
The Essential Tools for Network Marketing and MLM
Yes, there are some obvious ones like a phone or a computer, but let's dig down into the less apparent ones and talk about the tools that are most essential for success in your home business.
Email Autoresponder
The first tool that you must have is an e-mail autoresponder.
If you're not familiar with what this is, an e-mail autoresponder is simply a service that allows you to build a list of e-mail contacts and then send messages to them on a regular basis.
You can write these and send them right away, or build up a set of e-mails that are scheduled to go out on a time frame based on when the person opts in to your list.
This second piece is why it is called an autoresponder. The e-mails can be automatically delivered without you pushing the ‘send' button.
Some good autoresponder services include Get Response, Aweber, and iContact.
Your Lead Generation Blog
The second tool that you will need is a blog.
This will serve as a central hub for your marketing efforts.
The blog should be privately owned and hosted on your hosting account, rather than using a free blogging service like blogger, wordpress.com, weebly, etc.
Your blog provides a great platform for your audience to interact with you on a regular basis, and serves as kind of an anchor point to which you can direct everything, and on which you can put capture forms to add people to your e-mail list.
This makes a blog an essential tool in your business-building efforts.
Video Camera
A third tool that I highly recommend is something to record videos on.
This could be as simple as your phone or WebCam, or you may decide to go a little fancier with some sort of video camera.
Videos allow you to connect with your audience in a very personal manner, and you can share these with your subscribers directly in your blog posts.
Photo Editing Software
A fourth tool that I recommend is some sort of photo editing software.
You are going to need engaging images on your blog, and perhaps even in your e-mails.
You will definitely need great images to be used in your marketing, especially if you're using a highly visual medium like Facebook.
Images connect with people and draw them in a manner that plain text on a page just can't do.
I have the full Adobe Suite of applications, but you don't need access to anything that fancy when you're first starting out.
In fact, here is a really great free photo editing tool that I just recently was introduced to.
It allows you to create and edit images for all types of purposes, and has some really great built-in templates.
Network Marketing Tools Recap
With those four tools – an e-mail autoresponder, a blog, a video camera, and photo editing software, you have the most important part of your toolkit put together, and can do some pretty stellar marketing work with these.
If you take the time to simply employ them consistently and build your business, with these simple tools you can build a highly successful network marketing or MLM business.
Avoid the temptation to spend lots of money on shiny tools with lots of bells and whistles.
These are often just highly distracting, and will pull you away from the true marketing activities that are needed to build your business.
If you'd like to learn more about how to most effectively implement these tools for building your network marketing business, then here is some really great training you should check out.